Instinct perfected is a faculty of using and even constructing organized instruments; intelligence perfected is the faculty of making and using unorganized instruments.
HENRI BERGSONHowever spontaneous it seems, laughter always implies a kind of secret freemasonry, or even complicity, with other laughers, real or imaginary.
More Henri Bergson Quotes
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There is nothing [that] disarms us like laughter.
HENRI BERGSON -
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 -
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 -
However spontaneous it seems, laughter always implies a kind of secret freemasonry, or even complicity, with other laughers, real or imaginary.
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 -
Laughter is the corrective force which prevents us from becoming cranks.
HENRI BERGSON -
Sex-appeal is the keynote of our whole civilization.
HENRI BERGSON -
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 -
An absolute can only be given in an intuition, while all the rest has to do with analysis.
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 -
There is no greater joy than that of feeling oneself a creator. The triumph of life is expressed by creation.
HENRI BERGSON -
The emotion felt by a man in the presence of nature certainly counts for something in the origin of religions.
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 -
The major task of the twentieth century will be to explore the unconscious, to investigate the subsoil of the mind.
HENRI BERGSON -
I cannot escape the objection that there is no state of mind, however simple, that does not change every moment.
HENRI BERGSON