In laughter we always find an unavowed intention to humiliate and consequently to correct our neighbour.
HENRI BERGSONThe only cure for vanity is laughter. And the only fault that’s laughable is vanity.
More Henri Bergson Quotes
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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.
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To exist is to change, to change is to mature, to mature is to go on creating oneself endlessly.
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There is nothing in philosophy which could not be said in everyday language.
HENRI BERGSON -
Genius is that which forces the inertia of humanity to learn.
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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 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 -
Some other faculty than the intellect is necessary for the apprehension of reality.
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The major task of the twentieth century will be to explore the unconscious, to investigate the subsoil of the mind.
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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 -
When it is said that an object occupies a large space in the soul or even that it fills it entirely, we ought to understand by this simply that its image has altered the shade of a thousand perceptions or memories.
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 -
I believe I experience creativity at every moment of my life.
HENRI BERGSON -
Art has no other object than to set aside the symbols of practical utility, the generalities that are conventionally and socially accepted, everything in fact which masks reality from us, in order to set us face to face with reality itself.
HENRI BERGSON -
It seems that laughter needs an echo.
HENRI BERGSON -
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 -
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 -
I see plainly how external images influence the image that I call my body : they transmit movement to it.
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 -
And I also see how this body influences external images: it gives back movement to them.
HENRI BERGSON -
To ease another’s burden, help to carry it.
HENRI BERGSON -
The emotion felt by a man in the presence of nature certainly counts for something in the origin of religions.
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Laughter is the corrective force which prevents us from becoming cranks.
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It is emotion that drives the intelligence forward in spite of obstacles.
HENRI BERGSON -
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 -
Life does not proceed by the association and addition of elements, but by dissociation and division.
HENRI BERGSON -
Instinct perfected is a faculty of using and even constructing organized instruments; intelligence perfected is the faculty of making and using unorganized instruments.
HENRI BERGSON