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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.

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

Art Attitude Eyes Image Ourselves Reproduction Run Success
Homo sapiens, the only creature endowed with reason, is also the only creature to pin its existence on things unreasonable.
HENRI BERGSON

Brain Known Question Reason Science Wisdom
The present contains nothing more than the past, and what is found in the effect was already in the cause.
HENRI BERGSON

Effect Past Present Reason
Some other faculty than the intellect is necessary for the apprehension of reality.
HENRI BERGSON

Intellectual Necessary Reality
Sex-appeal is the keynote of our whole civilization.
HENRI BERGSON

Appearance Civilization Sex
Laughter is the corrective force which prevents us from becoming cranks.
HENRI BERGSON

Correct Force Laughter Prevent
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
It 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.
HENRI BERGSON

Carry Essence Feeling Intelligence View
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
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
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
Intelligence is characterized by a natural incomprehension of life.
HENRI BERGSON

Character Intelligence Life Natural
The idea of the future, pregnant with an infinity of possibilities, is thus more fruitful than the future itself, and this is why we find more charm in hope than in possession, in dreams than in reality.
HENRI BERGSON

Dreams Future Hope Ideas Possession Pregnant Reality
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
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.
HENRI BERGSON

Action Beginning Body Image Place State
I would say act like a man of thought and think like a man of action.
HENRI BERGSON

Act Action Man Myself Thinking

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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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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