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 BERGSONWe 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 BERGSONThe emotion felt by a man in the presence of nature certainly counts for something in the origin of religions.
HENRI BERGSONThere is no greater joy than that of feeling oneself a creator. The triumph of life is expressed by creation.
HENRI BERGSONThe universe… is a machine for the making of gods.
HENRI BERGSONTo ease another’s burden, help to carry it.
HENRI BERGSONEurope 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 BERGSONThe only cure for vanity is laughter. And the only fault that’s laughable is vanity.
HENRI BERGSONA 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 BERGSONIs 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 BERGSONAnd I also see how this body influences external images: it gives back movement to them.
HENRI BERGSONLaughter 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 BERGSONIn laughter we always find an unavowed intention to humiliate and consequently to correct our neighbour.
HENRI BERGSONYou 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 BERGSONWhen 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 BERGSONThere 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 BERGSONThere is nothing [that] disarms us like laughter.
HENRI BERGSON