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.Collection: Intelligence
Intelligence is the faculty of making artificial objects, especially tools to make tools.Collection: Intelligence
To exist is to change, to change is to mature, to mature is to go on creating oneself endlessly.Collection: Change
Instinct perfected is a faculty of using and even constructing organized instruments; intelligence perfected is the faculty of making and using unorganized instruments.Collection: Intelligence
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.Collection: Attitude
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.Collection: Imagination
Think like a man of action, act like a man of thought.
Life does not proceed by the association and addition of elements, but by dissociation and division.
Our laughter is always the laughter of a group.
Some other faculty than the intellect is necessary for the apprehension of reality.
It seems that laughter needs an echo.
The present contains nothing more than the past, and what is found in the effect was already in the cause.
An absolute can only be given in an intuition, while all the rest has to do with analysis.
In laughter we always find an unavowed intention to humiliate and consequently to correct our neighbour.
There is no greater joy than that of feeling oneself a creator. The triumph of life is expressed by creation.
Sex appeal is the keynote of our civilization.
Homo sapiens, the only creature endowed with reason, is also the only creature to pin its existence on things unreasonable.
Wherever anything lives, there is, open somewhere, a register in which time is being inscribed.
In its entirety, probably, it follows us at every instant; all that we have felt, thought and willed from our earliest infancy is there, leaning over the present which is about to join it, pressing against the portals of consciousness that would fain leave it outside.
The only cure for vanity is laughter, and the only fault that is laughable is vanity.
I see plainly how external images influence the image that I call my body: they transmit movement to it.
The motive power of democracy is love.
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.
To perceive means to immobilize... we seize, in the act of perception, something which outruns perception itself.
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.
In reality, the past is preserved by itself automatically.
There is nothing in philosophy which could not be said in everyday language.
And I also see how this body influences external images: it gives back movement to them.
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.
Religion is to mysticism what popularization is to science.
Genius is that which forces the inertia of humanity to learn.
I cannot escape the objection that there is no state of mind, however simple, that does not change every moment.
The major task of the twentieth century will be to explore the unconscious, to investigate the subsoil of the mind.
For life is tendency, and the essence of a tendency is to develop in the form of a sheaf, creating, by its very growth, divergent directions among which its impetus is divided.
Fortunately, some are born with spiritual immune systems that sooner or later give rejection to the illusory worldview grafted upon then from birth through social conditioning. They begin sensing that something is amiss, and start looking for answers. Inner knowledge and anomalous outer experiences show them a side of reality others are oblivious to, and so begins the journey of awakening. Each step of the journey is made by following the heart instead of the crowd, and by choosing knowledge over veils of ignorance.Collection: Motivational
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.Collection: Dream
I would say act like a man of thought and think like a man of action.Collection: Inspirational
Intuition is a method of feeling one's way intellectually into the inner heart of a thing to locate what is unique and inexpressible in it.Collection: Heart
It is emotion that drives the intelligence forward in spite of obstacles.Collection: Emotion
To drive out the darkness, bring in the light.Collection: Light
Intelligence is characterized by a natural incomprehension of life.Collection: Wisdom
Men do not sufficiently realize that their future is in their own hands. Theirs is the task of determining first of all whether they want to go on living or not. Theirs is the responsibility, then, for deciding if they want merely to live, or intend to make just the extra effort required for fulfilling, even on this refractory planet, the essential function of the universe, which is a machine for the making of gods.Collection: Responsibility
Laughter is the corrective force which prevents us from becoming cranks.Collection: Happiness
The movement of the stream is distinct from the river bed, although it must adopt its winding course.Collection: Rivers
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.Collection: Art
ACT as men of thought; THINK as men of action.Collection: Men
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.Collection: Art
The universe... is a machine for the making of gods.Collection: Machines
To perceive means to immobilize. To say this is to say that we seize, in the act of perception, something which outruns perception itself.Collection: Mean
... divine love is not something belonging to God: it is God Himself.Collection: Love