14 quotes
If we would have new knowledge, we must get us a whole world of new questions.
Philosophy in a New Key (1942)
Art is the objectification of feeling, and the subjectification of nature.
Mind: An Essay on Human Feeling (1967)
Art is the creation of forms symbolic of human feeling.
Feeling and Form (1953)
The seeds of civilization are in every culture, but it is city life that brings them to fruition.
Philosophical Sketches (1962)
Common-sense knowledge is prompt, categorical, and inexact.
Philosophy in a New Key (1942)
Music is the tonal analogue of emotive life.
Feeling and Form (1953)
The way a question is asked limits and disposes the ways in which any answer to it—right or wrong—may be given.
Philosophy in a New Key (1942)
Philosophizing is a process of making sense out of experience, rather than adding to experience itself, as factual learning and experimental investigation do.
Philosophical Sketches (1962)
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.
Mind: An Essay on Human Feeling (1967)
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.
Mind: An Essay on Human Feeling (1967)
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.
Philosophical Sketches (1962)
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.
Feeling and Form (1953)
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.
Philosophy in a New Key (1942)
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.
Feeling and Form (1953)