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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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Susanne Katherina Langer
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More quotes by Susanne Katherina Langer

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Music is our myth of the inner life.
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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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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Philosophizing is a process of making sense out of experience.
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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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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As comedy presents the vital rhythm of self-preservation, tragedy exhibits that of self-consummation.
Susanne Katherina Langer
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Is it conceivable that mysticism is a mark of inadequate art?
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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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
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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.
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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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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The function of art is to acquaint the beholder with something he has not known before.
Susanne Katherina Langer
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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.
Susanne Katherina Langer
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Music is the tonal analogue of emotive life.
Susanne Katherina Langer
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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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The fairytale is irresponsible it is frankly imaginary, and its purpose is to gratify wishes, as a dream doth flatter.
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 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