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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

It is the very essence of intelligence to coordinate means with a view to a remote end, and to undertake what it does not feel absolutely sure of carrying out.
HENRI BERGSON

Carry Essence Feeling Intelligence View
Action on the move creates its own route, creates to a very great extent the conditions under which it is to be fulfilled and thus baffles all calculation.
HENRI BERGSON

Action Calculation Creation Greatness Move
An absolute can only be given in an intuition, while all the rest has to do with analysis.
HENRI BERGSON

Analyse Intuition Rest
And I also see how this body influences external images: it gives back movement to them.
HENRI BERGSON

Body Influence Movement Myself Return
There is nothing [that] disarms us like laughter.
HENRI BERGSON

Guard Laughter Ourselves
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

Development Direction Essence Form Growth Life
The universe… is a machine for the making of gods.
HENRI BERGSON

God Machine Universe
We are free when our actions emanate from our total personality, when they express it, when they resemble it in the indefinable way a work of art sometimes does the artist.
HENRI BERGSON

Action Artist Expression Freedom
However spontaneous it seems, laughter always implies a kind of secret freemasonry, or even complicity, with other laughers, real or imaginary.
HENRI BERGSON

Complication Imagination Kind Laughter Reality
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
The only cure for vanity is laughter. And the only fault that’s laughable is vanity.
HENRI BERGSON

Errors Laughter Mistake Vanity
Some other faculty than the intellect is necessary for the apprehension of reality.
HENRI BERGSON

Intellectual Necessary Reality
Religion is to mysticism what popularization is to science.
HENRI BERGSON

Mystic Popular Religion Science
In laughter we always find an unavowed intention to humiliate and consequently to correct our neighbour.
HENRI BERGSON

Correct Humiliate Intention Laughter Neighbor Ourselves
We regard intelligence as man’s main characteristic and we know that there is no superiority which intelligence cannot confer on us, no inferiority for which it cannot compensate.
HENRI BERGSON

Character Compensation Intelligence Man
The present contains nothing more than the past, and what is found in the effect was already in the cause.
HENRI BERGSON

Effect Past Present Reason

To perceive means to immobilize. To say this is to say that we seize, in the act of perception, something which outruns perception itself.

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To perceive means to immobilize. To say this is to say that we seize, in the act of perception, something which outruns perception itself.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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