Top 40 Susanne Katherina Langer Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “The seeds of civilization are in every culture, but it is city life that brings them to fruition.”

— Susanne Katherina Langer

2. “Philosophizing is a process of making sense out of experience...”

— Susanne Katherina Langer

3. “Art is the creation of forms symbolic of human feeling.”

— Susanne Katherina Langer

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

— Susanne Katherina Langer

5. “Music is the tonal analogue of emotive life.”

— Susanne Katherina Langer

6. “If we would have new knowledge, we must get a whole world of new questions.”

— Susanne Katherina Langer

7. “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.”

— Susanne Katherina Langer

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

— Susanne Katherina Langer

9. “Real thinking is possible only in the light of genuine language, no matter how limited, how primitive.”

— Susanne Katherina Langer

10. “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

11. “Music is our myth of the inner life...”

— Susanne Katherina Langer

12. “Common-sense knowledge is prompt, categorical, and inexact.”

— Susanne Katherina Langer

13. “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

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

— Susanne Katherina Langer

15. “One can bear anything of which one is able to conceive.”

— Susanne Katherina Langer

16. “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.”

— Susanne Katherina Langer

17. “The way a question is asked limits and disposes the ways in which any answer to it-right or wrong-may be given.”

— Susanne Katherina Langer

18. “Most new discoveries are suddenly-seen things that were always there.”

— Susanne Katherina Langer

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

— Susanne Katherina Langer

20. “Cinema is like dream.”

— Susanne Katherina Langer

21. “Most new discoveries are suddenly-seen things that were always there. A new idea is a light that illuminates presences which simply had no form before the light fell on them.”

— Susanne Katherina Langer

22. “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

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

— Susanne Katherina Langer

24. “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.”

— Susanne Katherina Langer

25. “Speech is the mark of humanity. It is the normal terminus of thought.”

— Susanne Katherina Langer

26. “Art is the objectification of feeling, and the subjectification of nature.”

— Susanne Katherina Langer

27. “A philosophy is characterized more by the formulation of its problem than by its solution of them.”

— Susanne Katherina Langer

28. “As comedy presents the vital rhythm of self-preservation, tragedy exhibits that of self-consummation.”

— Susanne Katherina Langer

29. “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

30. “The function of art is to acquaint the beholder with something he has not known before.”

— Susanne Katherina Langer

31. “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

32. “Tragedy dramatizes human life as potentiality and fulfillment. Its virtual future, or Destiny, is therefore quite different from that created in comedy. Comic Destiny is Fortune.”

— Susanne Katherina Langer

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

— Susanne Katherina Langer

34. “The fairytale is irresponsible; it is frankly imaginary, and its purpose is to gratify wishes, as a dream doth flatter.”

— Susanne Katherina Langer

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

— Susanne Katherina Langer

36. “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

37. “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.”

— Susanne Katherina Langer

38. “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

39. “The Past, being in the mode of memory, is closed, inalienable, and irreparable...”

— Susanne Katherina Langer

40. “What is artistically good is whatever articulates and presents feeling to our understanding.”

— Susanne Katherina Langer

41. “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

42. “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

43. “Pioneering is the work of individuals...”

— Susanne Katherina Langer

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

— Susanne Katherina Langer

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

— Susanne Katherina Langer

46. “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

47. “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.”

— Susanne Katherina Langer

48. “Is it conceivable that mysticism is a mark of inadequate art?”

— Susanne Katherina Langer

49. “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.”

— Susanne Katherina Langer