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Religion, even the most primitive and superstitious, is inevitably a beginning of culture. It is not possible without some kind of symbolic expression ... and begets dramatic gesture, dance, and chant.

Susanne Katherina Langer

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Susanne Katherina Langer
Beginning
Gesture
Expression
Begets
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Symbolic
Religion
Inevitably
Culture
Gestures
Without
Primitive
Even
Dramatic
Chant
Kind
Dance
Superstitious

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It is significant that people who refuse to tell their children fairytales do not fear that the children will believe in princes and princesses, but that they will believe in witches and bogeys.
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Ritual is the most primitive reflection of serious thought, a slow deposit, as it were, of people's imaginative insight into life.
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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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If we would have new knowledge, we must get a whole world of new questions.
Susanne Katherina Langer
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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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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 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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Cinema is like dream.
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Common-sense knowledge is prompt, categorical, and inexact.
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One can bear anything of which one is able to conceive.
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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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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.
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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.
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