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Fire is a natural symbol of life and passion, though it is the one element in which nothing can actually live.

Susanne Katherina Langer

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Susanne Katherina Langer
Nothing
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Fire
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Though
Actually
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More quotes by Susanne Katherina Langer

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The historian does not locate known facts in a hypothetical, general pattern of processes his aim is to link fact to fact, one unique knowable event to another individual one that begot it.
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If a work of art is a projection of feeling, its kinship with organic nature will emerge, no matter through how many transformations, logically and inevitably.
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Is it conceivable that mysticism is a mark of inadequate art?
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Speech is the mark of humanity. It is the normal terminus of thought.
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Most new discoveries are suddenly-seen things that were always there.
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To trace the development of mind from earliest times ... requires ... not a categorical concept, but a functional one.... The most promising operational principle for this purpose is the principle of individuation.
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Common-sense knowledge is prompt, categorical, and inexact.
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The function of art is to acquaint the beholder with something he has not known before.
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A mind that is very selective to forms... is apt to use its images metaphorically, to exploit their possible significance for the conception of remote or intangible ideas.
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It is the historical mind, rather than the scientific (in the physicist's sense), that destroyed the mythical orientation of European culture the historian, not the mathematician, introduced the higher criticism, the standard of actual fact. It is he who is the real apostle of the realistic age.
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What is artistically good is whatever articulates and presents feeling to our understanding.
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Artistic form is congruent with the dynamic forms of our direct sensuous, mental, and emotional life works of art are projections of felt life, as Henry James called it, into spatial, temporal, and poetic structures.
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Art is the creation of forms symbolic of human feeling.
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We have no physical model of this endless rhythm of individuation and involvement, we do have its image in the world of art, most purely in dance.
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The power of magic has no known limits. A person knows, in a fair way, his own physical capacities, the weight of the blows he can deal, the furthest range of his arrows, the strength of his voice, the speed and endurance of his running but the reaches of his mind are indefinite and, to his feeling, infinite.
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Philosophizing is a process of making sense out of experience.
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Nature, as man has always known it, he knows no more. Since he has learned to esteem signs above symbols, to suppress his emotional reactions in favor of practical ones and make use of nature instead of holding so much of it sacred, he has altered the face, if not the heart, of reality.
Susanne Katherina Langer
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A signal is comprehended if it serves to make us notice the object or situation it bespeaks. A symbol is understood when we conceive the idea it presents.
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In human life, art may arise from almost any activity, and once it does so, it is launched on a long road of exploration, invention, freedom to the limits of extravagance, interference to the point of frustration, finally discipline, controlling constant change and growth.
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A philosophy is characterized more by the formulation of its problem than by its solution of them.
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