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

Susanne Katherina Langer

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Susanne Katherina Langer
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More quotes by Susanne Katherina Langer

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The intellectual treatment of any datum, any experience, any subject, is determined by the nature of our questions, and only carried out in the answers.
Susanne Katherina Langer
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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.
Susanne Katherina Langer
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Philosophizing is a process of making sense out of experience.
Susanne Katherina Langer
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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
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Most new discoveries are suddenly-seen things that were always there.
Susanne Katherina Langer
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Only a creature that can think symbolically about life can conceive of its own death. Our knowledge of death is part of our knowledge of life.
Susanne Katherina Langer
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Most new discoveries are suddenly-seen things that were always there. A new idea is a light that illuminates presences which simply had no form before the light fell on them.
Susanne Katherina Langer
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the wide discrepancy between reason and feeling may be unreal it is not improbable that intellect is a high form of feeling - a specialized, intensive feeling about intuitions.
Susanne Katherina Langer
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Art is the objectification of feeling, and the subjectification of nature.
Susanne Katherina Langer
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Every artistic form reflects the dynamism that is constantly building up the life of feeling.
Susanne Katherina Langer
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The continual pursuit of meanings-wider, clearer, more negotiable, more articulate meanings- is philosophy.
Susanne Katherina Langer
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Art is the creation of forms symbolic of human feeling.
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.
Susanne Katherina Langer
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Cinema is like dream.
Susanne Katherina Langer
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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.
Susanne Katherina Langer
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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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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.
Susanne Katherina Langer
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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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Common-sense knowledge is prompt, categorical, and inexact.
Susanne Katherina Langer
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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.
Susanne Katherina Langer