Quotes by Henri Bergson - Page 2

However spontaneous it seems, laughter always implies a kind of secret freemasonry, or even complicity, with other laughers, real or imaginary.
Henri Bergson / Philosopher
Laughter
Real
Secret
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Europe 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 Bergson / Philosopher
Men
War
Self
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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?
Henri Bergson / Philosopher
Children
Hands
Trying
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Action on the move creates its own route, creates to a very great extent the conditions under which it is to be fulfilled and thus baffles all calculation.
Henri Bergson / Philosopher
Action
Habit
Moving
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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 Bergson / Philosopher
Freedom
Form
Movement
Perception
Feeds
Movements
Perceptions
Stamped
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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 / Philosopher
Essence
Mean
Views
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Instinct perfected is a faculty of using and even constructing organized instruments; intelligence perfected is the faculty of making and using unorganized instruments.
Henri Bergson / Philosopher
Faculty
Instinct
Instruments
Intuition
Natural Instinct
Organized
Constructing
Unorganized
Using
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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 / Philosopher
Art
Communication
Reality
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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 / Philosopher
Art
Work
Personality
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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.
Henri Bergson / Philosopher
Life
Creating
Divergent
Essence
Growth
Impetus
Among
Develop
Directions
Tendency
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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.
Henri Bergson / Philosopher
Men
Characteristics
Inferiority
Regard
Superiority
Characteristic
Compensate
Main
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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.
Henri Bergson / Philosopher
Imagination
Add
Perception
Pure
Requirements
Vision
Life Vision Your
External
Obtain
Perhaps
Stripped
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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 / Philosopher
Comic
Different
Independent
Series
Two
Interpreted
Meanings
Simultaneously
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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 / Philosopher
Dream
Ideas
Reality
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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 urging the manufacture.
Henri Bergson / Philosopher
Intelligence
Faculty
Intellect
Tools
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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.
Henri Bergson / Philosopher
Intelligence
Faculty
Philosophical
Tools
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There 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 Bergson / Philosopher
Degrees
Different
Psychics
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It is of man's essence to create materially and morally, to fabricate things and to fabricate himself. Homo faber is the definition I propose ... Homo faber, Homo sapiens, I pay my respects to both, for they tend to merge.
Henri Bergson / Philosopher
Men
Definitions
Essence
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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.
Henri Bergson / Philosopher
Art
Running
Attitude
Eye
Sole
Symbolic
Becomes
Contracted
Positions
Runner
Runs
Successive
Thousands
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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 / Philosopher
Body
Cerebral
House
Perception
Condition
Images
No Sense
Perceived
Replace
Thus
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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 / Philosopher
Art
Order
Reality
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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.
Henri Bergson / Philosopher
Consciousness
Entirety
Felt
Infancy
Instant
Earliest
Leave
Fain
Follows
Join
Leaning
Present
Outside
Portals
Pressing
Willed
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All the translations of a poem in all possible languages may add nuance to nuance and, by a kind of mutual retouching, by correcting one another, may give an increasingly faithful picture of the poem they translate, yet they will never give the inner meaning of the original.
Henri Bergson / Philosopher
Faith
Poetry
Giving
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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 / Philosopher
Kindness
Laughter
Taken
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It is with our entire past ... that we desire, will and act ... from this survival of the past it follows that consciousness cannot go through the same state twice. The circumstances may still be the same, but they will act no longer on the same person ... that is why our duration is irreversible.
Henri Bergson / Philosopher
Science
Past
Survival
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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, and that in this sense it pervades them, although it does not itself come into view.
Henri Bergson / Philosopher
Space
Memories
Views
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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, something beginning with a crash, to continue in successive rumblings, like thunder in a mountain.
Henri Bergson / Philosopher
Echoes
Laughter
Mountain
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An absolute can only be given in an intuition, while all the rest has to do with analysis. We call intuition here the sympathy by which one is transported into the interior of an object in order to coincide with what there is unique andconsequently inexpressible in it. Analysis, on the contrary, is the operation which reduces the object to elements already known.
Henri Bergson / Philosopher
Intuition
Order
Unique
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All the living hold together, and all yield to the same tremendous push. The animal takes its stand on the plant, man bestrides animality, and the whole of humanity, in space and in time, is one immense army galloping beside and before and behind each of us in an overwhelming charge able to beat down every resistance and clear the most formidable obstacles, perhaps even death.
Henri Bergson / Philosopher
Men
Animal
Army
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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.
Henri Bergson / Philosopher
Men
Hands
Responsibility
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On the other hand, the pleasure caused by laughter, even on the stage, is not an unadulterated enjoyment; it is not a pleasure that is exclusively esthetic or altogether disinterested. It always implies a secret or unconscious intent, if not of each one of us, at all events of society as a whole. In laughter we always find an unavowed intention to humiliate, and consequently to correct our neighbour, if not in his will, at least in his deed.
Henri Bergson / Philosopher
Hands
Laughter
Secret
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I believe that the time given to refutation in philosophy is usually time lost. Of the many attacks directed by many thinkers against each other, what now remains? Nothing, or assuredly very little. That which counts and endures is the modicum of positive truth which each contributes. The true statement is, of itself, able to displace the erroneous idea, and becomes, without our having taken the trouble of refuting anyone, the best of refutations.
Henri Bergson / Philosopher
Time
Philosophy
Taken
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Knowledge, in so far as it is directed to practical matters, has only to enumerate the principal possible attitudes of the thing towards us, as well as our best possible attitude towards it. Therein lies the ordinary function of ready-made concepts, those stations with which we mark out the path of becoming. But to seek to penetrate with them into the inmost nature of things, is to apply to the mobility of the real a method created in order to give stationary points of observation on it.
Henri Bergson / Philosopher
Nature
Order
Real
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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.
Henri Bergson / Philosopher
Experience
Journey
Knowledge
Motivational
Philosophy
Spiritual
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The prestige of the Nobel Prize is due to many causes, but in particular to its twofold idealistic and international character: idealistic in that it has been designed for works of lofty inspiration; international in that it is awarded after the production of different countries has been minutely studied and the intellectual balance sheet of the whole world has been drawn up. Free from all other considerations and ignoring any but intellectual values, the judges have deliberately taken their place in what the philosophers have called a community of the mind.
Henri Bergson / Philosopher
Country
Inspiration
Taken
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Henri Bergson Quotes - Page 2

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