“Homo sapiens, the only creature endowed with reason, is also the only creature to pin its existence on things unreasonable.”

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.

In reality, the past is preserved by itself automatically.

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.

When we make the cerebral state the beginning of an action, and in no sense the condition of a perception, we place the perceived images of things outside the image of our body, and thus replace perception within the things themselves.

ACT as men of thought; THINK as men of action.

And I also see how this body influences external images: it gives back movement to them.

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.

The universe… is a machine for the making of gods.

Laughter is the corrective force which prevents us from becoming cranks.

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.

Some other faculty than the intellect is necessary for the apprehension of reality.

The emotion felt by a man in the presence of nature certainly counts for something in the origin of religions.

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?

Instinct perfected is a faculty of using and even constructing organized instruments; intelligence perfected is the faculty of making and using unorganized instruments.

Wherever anything lives, there is, open somewhere, a register in which time is being inscribed.

Divine love is not something belonging to God: it is God Himself.

Perhaps consciousness arises when the brain’s simulation of the world becomes so complex that it must include a model of itself.

There is nothing like chess to keep the brain smart, and give it a workout.

To let the brain work without sufficient material is like racing an engine. It racks itself to pieces.

I’m crazy, I’m nuts. Just the way my brain works. I’m not normal. I think differently.

I have better use for my brain than to poison it with alcohol. To put alcohol in the human brain is like putting sand in the bearings of an engine.

All beauty comes from beautiful blood and a beautiful brain.

You’ve got to love what’s loveable and hate what’s hateable. It takes brains to see the difference.

Logic is using the front part of the brain, that’s all.