Susanne Langer Quotes
Susanne Knauth Langer was an American philosopher of mind, art, and language and one of the first women to achieve a major reputation in twentieth-century American philosophy. A student of Whitehead at Harvard, she developed a philosophy of symbolic forms in conversation with the work of Cassirer, articulated in her widely read Philosophy in a New Key and the three-volume Mind: An Essay on Human Feeling. The quotes below are attributed to Susanne Langer, organized by topic.
Susanne Langer on Mind
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Attributed to Susanne Langer:
“Art is the symbolic expression of human feeling.”
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Attributed to Susanne Langer:
“The mind is a symbol-making organ.”
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Attributed to Susanne Langer:
“Music is the morphology of feeling.”
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Attributed to Susanne Langer:
“Symbols are the principal instruments of human thought.”
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Attributed to Susanne Langer:
“A philosophy without an aesthetic is a philosophy that has not understood mind.”