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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

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

Astonish Children Fly Object Philosophy Try
The motive power of democracy is love.
HENRI BERGSON

Democracy Love Motive Power
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

Dreams Future Hope Ideas Possession Pregnant Reality
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

Boredom Director Humiliate Impression Kindness Laughter Object Pain Society Sympathy
I would say act like a man of thought and think like a man of action.
HENRI BERGSON

Act Action Man Myself Thinking
Only those ideas that are least truly ours can be adequately expressed in words.
HENRI BERGSON

Expression Ideas Ourselves True Word
In reality, the past is preserved by itself automatically.
HENRI BERGSON

Past Preserve Reality
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

Art Attitude Eyes Image Ourselves Reproduction Run Success
Intuition is a method of feeling one’s way intellectually into the inner heart of a thing to locate what is unique and inexpressible in it.
HENRI BERGSON

Expression Feeling Heart Intellectual Unique
There is no greater joy than that of feeling oneself a creator. The triumph of life is expressed by creation.
HENRI BERGSON

Creation Expression Greatness Joy
There are manifold tones of mental life, or, in other words, our psychic life may be lived at different heights, now nearer to action, now further removed from it, according to the degree of our attention to life.
HENRI BERGSON

Attention Different Life Man Mental Ourselves Remove Tone
It seems that laughter needs an echo.
HENRI BERGSON

Echo Laughter Need
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

Act Meaning Perception Talk
When we make the cerebral state the beginning of an action, and in no sense the condition of a perception, we place the perceived images of things outside the image of our body, and thus replace perception within the things themselves.
HENRI BERGSON

Action Beginning Body Image Place State
Some other faculty than the intellect is necessary for the apprehension of reality.
HENRI BERGSON

Intellectual Necessary Reality
Our laughter is always the laughter of a group.
HENRI BERGSON

Group Laughter Ourselves

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.

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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.

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