A situation is always comic if it participates simultaneously in two series of events which are absolutely independent of each other, and if it can be interpreted in two quite different meanings.
HENRI BERGSONIf reality impacted directly on our senses and our consciousness, if we could have direct communication between the material world and ourselves, art would be unnecessary.
More Henri Bergson Quotes
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An absolute can only be given in an intuition, while all the rest has to do with analysis.
HENRI BERGSON -
I see plainly how external images influence the image that I call my body : they transmit movement to it.
HENRI BERGSON -
The movement of the stream is distinct from the river bed, although it must adopt its winding course.
HENRI BERGSON -
For life is tendency, and the essence of a tendency is to develop in the form of a sheaf, creating, by its very growth, divergent directions among which its impetus is divided.
HENRI BERGSON -
Europe is overpopulated, the world will soon be in the same condition, and if the self-reproduction of man is not rationalized… we shall have war.
HENRI BERGSON -
In short, intelligence, considered in what seems to be its original feature, is the faculty of manufacturing artificial objects, especially tools to make tools, and of indefinitely varying the manufacture.
HENRI BERGSON -
Life does not proceed by the association and addition of elements, but by dissociation and division.
HENRI BERGSON -
Is it astonishing that, like children trying to catch smoke by closing their hands, philosophers so often see the object they would grasp fly before them?
HENRI BERGSON -
The idea of the future, pregnant with an infinity of possibilities, is thus more fruitful than the future itself, and this is why we find more charm in hope than in possession, in dreams than in reality.
HENRI BERGSON -
To perceive means to immobilize. To say this is to say that we seize, in the act of perception, something which outruns perception itself.
HENRI BERGSON -
Religion is to mysticism what popularization is to science.
HENRI BERGSON -
Laughter appears to stand in need of an echo, Listen to it carefully: it is not an articulate, clear, well-defined sound; it is something which would fain be prolonged by reverberating from one to another.
HENRI BERGSON -
If reality impacted directly on our senses and our consciousness, if we could have direct communication between the material world and ourselves, art would be unnecessary.
HENRI BERGSON -
In just the same way the thousands of successive positions of a runner are contracted into one sole symbolic attitude, which our eye perceives, which art reproduces, and which becomes for everyone the image of a man who runs.
HENRI BERGSON -
Laughter is, above all, a corrective. Being intended to humiliate, it must make a painful impression on the person against whom it is directed. By laughter, society avenges itself for the liberties taken with it. It would fail in its object if it bore the stamp of sympathy or kindness.
HENRI BERGSON