Susanne K. Langer: Quotes about life

Susanne K. Langer was American philosopher. Explore interesting quotes on life.
Susanne K. Langer: 32 quotes0 likes

“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 K. Langer

Feeling and Form, ch. 19, Scribner (1953)

“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 K. Langer

Philosophical Sketches, Ayer (1979)

“Music is the tonal analogue of emotive life.”

Susanne K. Langer

Feeling and Form, ch. 1, p. 27, Scribner (1953)

“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 K. Langer

Vol. 1, p. 200
Mind: An Essay on Human Feeling (1967, 1972, 1982)

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

Susanne K. Langer

Source: Philosophical Sketches (1962), Ch. 6, p. 101