However spontaneous it seems, laughter always implies a kind of secret freemasonry, or even complicity, with other laughers, real or imaginary.
HENRI BERGSONThe movement of the stream is distinct from the river bed, although it must adopt its winding course.
More Henri Bergson Quotes
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In laughter we always find an unavowed intention to humiliate and consequently to correct our neighbour.
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There is no greater joy than that of feeling oneself a creator. The triumph of life is expressed by creation.
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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.
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Instinct perfected is a faculty of using and even constructing organized instruments; intelligence perfected is the faculty of making and using unorganized instruments.
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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.
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ACT as men of thought; THINK as men of action.
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Intelligence is characterized by a natural incomprehension of life.
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There is nothing [that] disarms us like laughter.
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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 -
The only cure for vanity is laughter. And the only fault that’s laughable is vanity.
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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.
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Sex-appeal is the keynote of our whole civilization.
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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.
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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 -
And I also see how this body influences external images: it gives back movement to them.
HENRI BERGSON -
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.
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The motive power of democracy is love.
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To ease another’s burden, help to carry it.
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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.
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Some other faculty than the intellect is necessary for the apprehension of reality.
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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.
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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.
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To drive out the darkness, bring in the light.
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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 -
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 -
The present contains nothing more than the past, and what is found in the effect was already in the cause.
HENRI BERGSON