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

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

Complication Imagination Kind Laughter Reality
In laughter we always find an unavowed intention to humiliate and consequently to correct our neighbour.
HENRI BERGSON

Correct Humiliate Intention Laughter Neighbor Ourselves
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
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 BERGSON

Artificial Feature Intelligence Manufacture Special Tools
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

Construction Faculty Instrument Intelligence Organization Perfection
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

Art Communication Direct Necessary Reality
ACT as men of thought; THINK as men of action.
HENRI BERGSON

Act Action Man Thinking
Intelligence is characterized by a natural incomprehension of life.
HENRI BERGSON

Character Intelligence Life Natural
There is nothing [that] disarms us like laughter.
HENRI BERGSON

Guard Laughter Ourselves
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
The only cure for vanity is laughter. And the only fault that’s laughable is vanity.
HENRI BERGSON

Errors Laughter Mistake Vanity
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
Sex-appeal is the keynote of our whole civilization.
HENRI BERGSON

Appearance Civilization Sex
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
Europe is overpopulated, the world will soon be in the same condition, and if the self-reproduction of man is not rationalized… we shall have war.
HENRI BERGSON

Condition Population Ration Reproduction War
And I also see how this body influences external images: it gives back movement to them.
HENRI BERGSON

Body Influence Movement Myself Return
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
The motive power of democracy is love.
HENRI BERGSON

Democracy Love Motive Power
To ease another’s burden, help to carry it.
HENRI BERGSON

Burden Carry Generosity Help
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
Some other faculty than the intellect is necessary for the apprehension of reality.
HENRI BERGSON

Intellectual Necessary 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
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
To drive out the darkness, bring in the light.
HENRI BERGSON

Darkness Drive Light
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
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
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

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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