Susanne Langer Quotes

Metaphor is the only possible language available to religion because it alone is honest about Mystery.

In short, then, the religious cult is based upon the representations of sorcery between man and man, and the sorcerer is older than the priest.

Any ritual is an opportunity for transformation.

What is any religion? A little ritual, a little superstition, and some magic. It's not a strictly spiritual affair; it has psychological roles to fulfill. You might not want it to be a religion based on your own experience but that's like wanting to clean up your dreams

Every legend, moreover, contains its residuum of truth, and the root function of language is to control the universe by describing it.

I used to practice Wicca.

Has the world ever been changed by anything save the thought and its magic vehicle the Word?

Religious speech is extreme, emotional, and motivational. It is anti-literal, relying on metaphor, allusion, and other rhetorical devices, and it assumes knowledge within a community of believers.

I select a very small number of things to be sceptical about, such as markets, and on these I am hypersceptic. But I want to be fooled by randomness in art. I want the ceremonial of religion; we are made for it.

My joke is that my father was a minister and my mother was an English teacher, so I'm trained to see the world in terms of symbols, which is hard when you just want to make toast.

Religion is close to theatre; much of its power comes from the effects of staging and framing.

Arabic is the language of Islam, but Arabic culture is not the culture of Islam.

Catch a black hen and beat it to death with a white cane. Keep the blood and smear a little of it on your enemy. If you get no chance to smear it on his body, obtain one of his garments and smear it.

A headscarf cannot be a political symbol…. If all political parties allowed women to wear a headscarf if they wanted, there would be no political symbol …. A woman who covers her head does so because of her beliefs not because of politics.

The beautiful thing about 'American Gods' is that it's very simple at its core.

Idiom is larger than geography it is the hot breath of a people singing, slashing, explorative. Imagery becomes the magic denominator, the language of a passage, saying the ancient unchanging particulars.

The piety of the Hebrew prophets purges their grossness. The circumcision is an example of the power of poetry to raise the low and offensive.

For her I changed pebbles into diamonds, shoes into mirrors, I changed glass into water, I gave her wings and pulled birds from her ears and in her pockets she found the feathers, I asked a pear to become a pineapple, a pineapple to become a lightbulb, a lightbulb to become the moon, and the moon to become a coin I flipped for her love.

I write a woman's oaths in water.

I'm good at doing the laundry. At least that. And it's a religious experience...Water, earth, fire-polarities of wet and dry, hot and cold, dirty and clean. The great cycles-round and round-beginning and end-Alpha and Omega, amen.

God was left out of the Constitution but was furnished a front seat on the coins of the country.

I think there's a reason why wine figures into so many religions. There's something transcendent about it. It's sort of the way that music is more than the sum of its parts. You have all these elements that make up the terroir that wine can communicate.

The believer in magic and miracles reflects on how to impose a law on nature--: and, in brief, the religious cult is the outcome of this reflection.

The language of religion can alone suit every situation and every mode of feeling.

Painting isn't an aesthetic operation; it's a form of magic designed as mediator between this strange hostile world and us.