Susanne Langer quotes

Susanne Langer was an American philosopher, writer, and educator best known for her work in philosophy of art and symbolism. Her landmark book "Philosophy in a New Key" explored how symbols, language, and art shape human understanding. She influenced generations of scholars by emphasizing the centrality of symbolism in human experience. Here are 19 of her quotes:

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-what the world will bring, and the man will take or miss, encounter or escape; tragic Destiny is what the man brings, and the world will demand of him. That is his Fate.

Susanne Langer

Art is the creation of forms symbolic of human feeling.

Susanne Langer

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

Susanne Langer

Common-sense knowledge is prompt, categorical, and inexact.

Susanne Langer

Philosophical questions are not by their nature insoluble. They are, indeed, radically different from scientific questions, because they concern the implications and other interrelations of ideas, not the order of physical events; their answers are interpretations instead of factual reports, and their function is to increase not our knowledge of nature, but our understanding of what we know.

Susanne Langer

Music is the tonal analogue of emotive life.

Susanne Langer

Art is the objectification of feeling, and the subjectification of nature.

Susanne Langer

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 Langer

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

Susanne Langer

Probably the profoundest difference between human and animal needs is made by one piece of human awareness, one fact that is not present to animals, because it is never learned in any direct experience: that is our foreknowledge of death. The fact that we ourselves must die is not a simple and isolated fact. It is built on a wide survey of facts that discloses the structure of history as a succession of overlapping brief lives, the patterns of youth and age, growth and decline; and above all that, it is built on the logical insight that one's own life is a case in point. 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 Langer

The primal and perennial work of social organization is not to fix the bounds of behavior as permanent lines, which would make all evolutionary process impossible, but to retrieve the vital balance every time some act, public or private, has upset it.

Susanne Langer

In a work of art, however modest, the peculiar character of life is always reflected in the fact that it has no parts which keep their qualitative identity in isolation. In the simplest design, the virtual constituents are indivisible, and inalienable from the whole.

Susanne Langer

Philosophizing is a process of making sense out of experience, rather than adding to experience itself, as factual learning and experimental investigation do.

Susanne Langer

The men in the laboratory... cannot be said to observe the actual objects of their curiosity at all. ...The sense data on which the propositions of modern science rest are, for the most part, little photographic spots and blurs, or inky curved lines on paper. ...What is directly observable is only a sign of the "physical fact"; it requires interpretation to yield scientific propositions.

Susanne Langer

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 Langer

Art is the objectification of feeling.

Susanne Langer

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 Langer