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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
Make
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More quotes by Susanne Katherina Langer

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Music is our myth of the inner life.
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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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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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Every artistic form reflects the dynamism that is constantly building up the life of feeling.
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The continual pursuit of meanings-wider, clearer, more negotiable, more articulate meanings- is philosophy.
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Cinema is like dream.
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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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One can bear anything of which one is able to conceive.
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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.
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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.
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The first impression of a work of art is its otherness from reality.
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Philosophizing is a process of making sense out of experience.
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The function of art is to acquaint the beholder with something he has not known before.
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If we would have new knowledge, we must get a whole world of new questions.
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The fairytale is irresponsible it is frankly imaginary, and its purpose is to gratify wishes, as a dream doth flatter.
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What is artistically good is whatever articulates and presents feeling to our understanding.
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Most new discoveries are suddenly-seen things that were always there.
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Music is the tonal analogue of emotive life.
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.
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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