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 BERGSONSome other faculty than the intellect is necessary for the apprehension of reality.
More Henri Bergson Quotes
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There is nothing in philosophy which could not be said in everyday language.
HENRI BERGSON -
When 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 BERGSON -
Life does not proceed by the association and addition of elements, but by dissociation and division.
HENRI BERGSON -
To exist is to change, to change is to mature, to mature is to go on creating oneself endlessly.
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 -
There is nothing [that] disarms us like laughter.
HENRI BERGSON -
Sex-appeal is the keynote of our whole civilization.
HENRI BERGSON -
We regard intelligence as man’s main characteristic and we know that there is no superiority which intelligence cannot confer on us, no inferiority for which it cannot compensate.
HENRI BERGSON -
The universe… is a machine for the making of gods.
HENRI BERGSON -
The motive power of democracy is love.
HENRI BERGSON -
To perceive means to immobilize. To say this is to say that we seize, in the act of perception, something which outruns perception itself.
HENRI BERGSON -
It is emotion that drives the intelligence forward in spite of obstacles.
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 -
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.
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 -
In reality, the past is preserved by itself automatically.
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 -
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 -
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 -
An absolute can only be given in an intuition, while all the rest has to do with analysis.
HENRI BERGSON -
I would say act like a man of thought and think like a man of action.
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 -
Religion is to mysticism what popularization is to science.
HENRI BERGSON -
The only cure for vanity is laughter. And the only fault that’s laughable is vanity.
HENRI BERGSON