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Susanne K. Langer
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“The way a question is asked limits and disposes the ways in which any answer to it — right or wrong — may be given.”
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“... a philosophy is characterized more by the formulation of its problems than by its solution of them.”
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“The limits of thought are not so much set from outside, by the fullness or poverty of experiences that meet the mind, as from within, by the power of conception, the wealth of formulative notions with which the mind meets experiences. Most new discoveries are suddenly-seen things that were always there.”
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“If we would have new knowledge, we must get us a whole world of new questions.”
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“Speech is the mark of humanity. It is the normal terminus of thought.”
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“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.”
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“Language is, without a doubt, the most momentous and at the same time the most mysterious product of the human mind.”
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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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“Ritual is the most primitive reflection of serious thought, a slow deposit, as it were, of people's imaginative insight into life.”
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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.”
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“Music is our myth of the inner life ...”
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“Is it conceivable that mysticism is a mark of inadequate art?”
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“Common-sense knowledge is prompt, categorical, and inexact.”
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“Cinema is like dream.”
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“As comedy presents the vital rhythm of self-preservation, tragedy exhibits that of self-consummation.”
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“All persistent practices in art have a creative function. They may serve several ends, but the chief one is the shaping of the work.”
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“Music is 'significant form,' and its significance is that of a symbol, a highly articulated, sensuous object, which by virtue of its dynamic structure can express the forms of vital experience which language is peculiarly unfit to convey. Feeling, life, motion and emotion constitute its import.”
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“... common sense is a very tricky instrument; it is as deceptive as it is indispensable.”
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“The arts objectify subjective reality, and subjectify outward experience of nature. Art education is the education of feeling, and a society that neglects it gives itself up to formless emotion. Bad art is corruption of feeling.”
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“Pioneering is the work of individuals ...”
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“The seeds of civilization are in every culture, but it is city life that brings them to fruition.”
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“Philosophizing is a process of making sense out of experience ...”
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“... the image of feeling created by artists, in every kind of art — plastic, musical, poetic, balletic — serves to hold the reality itself for our labile and volatile memory, as a touchstone to test the scope of our intellectual constructions.”
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“Art is just as comprehensible as science, but in its own terms ...”
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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.”
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“The high intellectual value of images, however, lies in the fact that they usually, and perhaps always, fit more than one actual experience.”
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“Art is the objectification of feeling, and the subjectification of nature.”
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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.”
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“The development of beings with minds is probably the highest individuation the world has ever known, and its prehistory is the history of life on earth.”
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“... value exists only where there is consciousness. Where nothing ever is felt, nothing matters.”
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“The Past, being in the mode of memory, is closed, inalienable, and irreparable ...”
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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.”
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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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“One can bear anything of which one is able to conceive.”
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“... the notion of giving something a name is the vastest generative idea that ever was conceived ...”
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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 K. Langer, U.S. philosopher, educator, writer
(1895 - 1985)
Full name: Susanne Katherina Knauth Langer.