Quotes from Susanne Katherina Langer

Music is the tonal analogue of emotive life.

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.

The continual pursuit of meanings-wider, clearer, more negotiable, more articulate meanings- is philosophy.

Philosophizing is a process of making sense out of experience.

Speech is the mark of humanity. It is the normal terminus of thought.

Fire is a natural symbol of life and passion, though it is the one element in which nothing can actually live.

Every artistic form reflects the dynamism that is constantly building up the life of feeling.

Music is our myth of the inner life.

Ritual is the most primitive reflection of serious thought, a slow deposit, as it were, of people's imaginative insight into life.

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.

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.

Language is, without a doubt, the most momentous and at the same time the most mysterious product of the human mind.

The first impression of a work of art is its otherness from reality.

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.

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.

Art is the creation of forms symbolic of human feeling.

Art is just as comprehensible as science, but in its own terms.

Is it conceivable that mysticism is a mark of inadequate art?

All persistent practices in art have a creative function. They may serve several ends, but the chief one is the shaping of the work.

The high intellectual value of images, however, lies in the fact that they usually, and perhaps always, fit more than one actual experience.

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.