Quote

The function of art is to acquaint the beholder with something he has not known before.

Susanne Katherina Langer

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Susanne Katherina Langer
Acquaint
Beholder
Function
Known
Art
Something

More quotes by Susanne Katherina Langer

Image
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.
Susanne Katherina Langer
Image
Art is the objectification of feeling, and the subjectification of nature.
Susanne Katherina Langer
Image
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
Image
Is it conceivable that mysticism is a mark of inadequate art?
Susanne Katherina Langer
Image
Fire is a natural symbol of life and passion, though it is the one element in which nothing can actually live.
Susanne Katherina Langer
Image
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
Image
Most new discoveries are suddenly-seen things that were always there.
Susanne Katherina Langer
Image
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.
Susanne Katherina Langer
Image
Common-sense knowledge is prompt, categorical, and inexact.
Susanne Katherina Langer
Image
Philosophizing is a process of making sense out of experience.
Susanne Katherina Langer
Image
The dancer, or dancers, must transform the stage for the audience as well as for themselves into an autonomous, complete, virtual realm, and all motions into a play of visible forces in unbroken, virtual time...Both space and time, as perceptible factors, disappear almost entirely in the dance illusion.
Susanne Katherina Langer
Image
A philosophy is characterized more by the formulation of its problem than by its solution of them.
Susanne Katherina Langer
Image
The first impression of a work of art is its otherness from reality.
Susanne Katherina Langer
Image
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.
Susanne Katherina Langer
Image
The fairytale is irresponsible it is frankly imaginary, and its purpose is to gratify wishes, as a dream doth flatter.
Susanne Katherina Langer
Image
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.
Susanne Katherina Langer
Image
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.
Susanne Katherina Langer
Image
The continual pursuit of meanings-wider, clearer, more negotiable, more articulate meanings- is philosophy.
Susanne Katherina Langer
Image
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.
Susanne Katherina Langer
Image
Music is our myth of the inner life.
Susanne Katherina Langer