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To drive out the darkness, bring in the light.

Henri Bergson

To exist is to change, to change is to mature, to mature is to go on creating oneself endlessly.
HENRI BERGSON

Change Creation End Existence Maturity
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
Genius is that which forces the inertia of humanity to learn.
HENRI BERGSON

Force Genius Humanity Knowledge Learning
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
Laughter is the corrective force which prevents us from becoming cranks.
HENRI BERGSON

Correct Force Laughter Prevent
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
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

Cosmos Different Independent Meaning Quite Series Situation
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
Wherever anything lives, there is, open somewhere, a register in which time is being inscribed.
HENRI BERGSON

Live Open Register Time
Life does not proceed by the association and addition of elements, but by dissociation and division.
HENRI BERGSON

Association Division Element Life Process
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
Realism is in the work when idealism is in the soul, and it is only through idealism that we resume contact with reality.
HENRI BERGSON

Contact Ideal Reality Resume Work
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
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
To ease another’s burden, help to carry it.
HENRI BERGSON

Burden Carry Generosity Help
One can always reason with reason.
HENRI BERGSON

Oneself Reason
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
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

Image Memories Object Perception Soul Space Understand
In laughter we always find an unavowed intention to humiliate and consequently to correct our neighbour.
HENRI BERGSON

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

Past Preserve Reality
Our laughter is always the laughter of a group.
HENRI BERGSON

Group Laughter Ourselves
Only those ideas that are least truly ours can be adequately expressed in words.
HENRI BERGSON

Expression Ideas Ourselves True Word
The movement of the stream is distinct from the river bed, although it must adopt its winding course.
HENRI BERGSON

Movement River Source Stream Wind
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
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 drive out the darkness, bring in the light.

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To drive out the darkness, bring in the light.

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