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 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.
More Henri Bergson Quotes
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The major task of the twentieth century will be to explore the unconscious, to investigate the subsoil of the mind.
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In reality, the past is preserved by itself automatically.
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There is nothing in philosophy which could not be said in everyday language.
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The motive power of democracy is love.
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Realism is in the work when idealism is in the soul, and it is only through idealism that we resume contact with reality.
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One can always reason with reason.
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The only cure for vanity is laughter. And the only fault that’s laughable is vanity.
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Life does not proceed by the association and addition of elements, but by dissociation and division.
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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?
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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.
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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.
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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.
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You 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.
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And I also see how this body influences external images: it gives back movement to them.
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If reality impacted directly on our senses and our consciousness, if we could have direct communication between the material world and ourselves, art would be unnecessary.
HENRI BERGSON