"Essay on Langer's life and works"

“Music is the tonal analogue of emotive life.”

“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.”

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

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

“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.”

“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.”