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The movement of the stream is distinct from the river bed, although it must adopt its winding course.

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

Dreams Future Hope Ideas Possession Pregnant Reality
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

Acceptance Art Face Fact Generality Object Practical Reality Social Symbol
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
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

Appearance Definition Laughter Oneself Sound
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
The motive power of democracy is love.
HENRI BERGSON

Democracy Love Motive Power
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
You will obtain a vision of matter that is perhaps fatiguing for your imagination, but pure and stripped of what the requirements of life make you add to it in external perception.
HENRI BERGSON

Add Matter Perception Requirement Strip Vision Yourself
I cannot escape the objection that there is no state of mind, however simple, that does not change every moment.
HENRI BERGSON

Escape Moments Object Simple Time
ACT as men of thought; THINK as men of action.
HENRI BERGSON

Act Action Man Thinking
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

Borrow Freedom Movement Restore Spirit
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
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
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
In laughter we always find an unavowed intention to humiliate and consequently to correct our neighbour.
HENRI BERGSON

Correct Humiliate Intention Laughter Neighbor Ourselves
In reality, the past is preserved by itself automatically.
HENRI BERGSON

Past Preserve Reality

The movement of the stream is distinct from the river bed, although it must adopt its winding course.

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The movement of the stream is distinct from the river bed, although it must adopt its winding course.

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