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 BERGSONThere 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.
More Henri Bergson Quotes
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Our laughter is always the laughter of a group.
HENRI BERGSON -
I see plainly how external images influence the image that I call my body : they transmit movement to it.
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 laughter we always find an unavowed intention to humiliate and consequently to correct our neighbour.
HENRI BERGSON -
The movement of the stream is distinct from the river bed, although it must adopt its winding course.
HENRI BERGSON -
There is nothing in philosophy which could not be said in everyday language.
HENRI BERGSON -
The universe… is a machine for the making of gods.
HENRI BERGSON -
It is emotion that drives the intelligence forward in spite of obstacles.
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 -
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 -
To ease another’s burden, help to carry it.
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 -
However spontaneous it seems, laughter always implies a kind of secret freemasonry, or even complicity, with other laughers, real or imaginary.
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 -
Spirit borrows from matter the perceptions on which it feeds and restores them to matter in the form of movements which it has stamped with its own freedom.
HENRI BERGSON