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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.
Susanne Katherina Langer
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Susanne Katherina Langer
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More quotes by Susanne Katherina Langer
The function of art is to acquaint the beholder with something he has not known before.
Susanne Katherina Langer
Magic, then, is not a method, but a language it is part and parcel of that greater phenomenon, ritual, which is the language of religion. Ritual is a symbolic transformation of experiences that no other medium can adequately express.
Susanne Katherina Langer
As comedy presents the vital rhythm of self-preservation, tragedy exhibits that of self-consummation.
Susanne Katherina Langer
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
Common-sense knowledge is prompt, categorical, and inexact.
Susanne Katherina Langer
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
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.
Susanne Katherina Langer
Fire is a natural symbol of life and passion, though it is the one element in which nothing can actually live.
Susanne Katherina Langer
Philosophizing is a process of making sense out of experience.
Susanne Katherina Langer
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.
Susanne Katherina Langer
The first impression of a work of art is its otherness from reality.
Susanne Katherina Langer
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
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
If we would have new knowledge, we must get a whole world of new questions.
Susanne Katherina Langer
What is artistically good is whatever articulates and presents feeling to our understanding.
Susanne Katherina Langer
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
Cinema is like dream.
Susanne Katherina Langer
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
The fairytale is irresponsible it is frankly imaginary, and its purpose is to gratify wishes, as a dream doth flatter.
Susanne Katherina Langer
Art is the objectification of feeling, and the subjectification of nature.
Susanne Katherina Langer
