Realism is in the work when idealism is in the soul, and it is only through idealism that we resume contact with reality.
HENRI BERGSONIt 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.
More Henri Bergson Quotes
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To drive out the darkness, bring in the light.
HENRI BERGSON -
It is emotion that drives the intelligence forward in spite of obstacles.
HENRI BERGSON -
Is it astonishing that, like children trying to catch smoke by closing their hands, philosophers so often see the object they would grasp fly before them?
HENRI BERGSON -
Religion is to mysticism what popularization is to science.
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 -
And I also see how this body influences external images: it gives back movement to them.
HENRI BERGSON -
The only cure for vanity is laughter. And the only fault that’s laughable is vanity.
HENRI BERGSON -
Homo sapiens, the only creature endowed with reason, is also the only creature to pin its existence on things unreasonable.
HENRI BERGSON -
Only those ideas that are least truly ours can be adequately expressed in words.
HENRI BERGSON -
The movement of the stream is distinct from the river bed, although it must adopt its winding course.
HENRI BERGSON -
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 major task of the twentieth century will be to explore the unconscious, to investigate the subsoil of the mind.
HENRI BERGSON -
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 urging the manufacture.
HENRI BERGSON -
In laughter we always find an unavowed intention to humiliate and consequently to correct our neighbour.
HENRI BERGSON -
Our laughter is always the laughter of a group.
HENRI BERGSON -
I would say act like a man of thought and think like a man of action.
HENRI BERGSON -
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 -
The emotion felt by a man in the presence of nature certainly counts for something in the origin of religions.
HENRI BERGSON -
Laughter is the corrective force which prevents us from becoming cranks.
HENRI BERGSON -
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 -
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 -
It seems that laughter needs an echo.
HENRI BERGSON -
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 -
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 -
I see plainly how external images influence the image that I call my body : they transmit movement to it.
HENRI BERGSON -
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