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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

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The first impression of a work of art is its otherness from reality.
Susanne Katherina Langer
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Feeling, in the broad sense of whatever is felt in any way, as sensory stimulus or inward tension, pain, emotion or intent, is the mark of mentality.
Susanne Katherina Langer
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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.
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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Cinema is like dream.
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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What is artistically good is whatever articulates and presents feeling to our understanding.
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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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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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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Music is our myth of the inner life.
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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The continual pursuit of meanings-wider, clearer, more negotiable, more articulate meanings- is philosophy.
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 creation of forms symbolic of human feeling.
Susanne Katherina Langer
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A philosophy is characterized more by the formulation of its problem than by its solution of them.
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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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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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
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Is it conceivable that mysticism is a mark of inadequate art?
Susanne Katherina Langer