"Religion is to mysticism what popularization is to science"
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Quote collection
Henri Bergson quotes (page 2 of 4)
75 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"... divine love is not something belonging to God: it is God Himself."
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"To drive out the darkness, bring in the light."
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"It is emotion that drives the intelligence forward in spite of obstacles."
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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."
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"In reality, the past is preserved by itself automatically."
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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."
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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."
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"The universe... is a machine for the making of gods."
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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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"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."
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"The only cure for vanity is laughter. And the only fault that's laughable is vanity."
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"One can always reason with reason."
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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."
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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."
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"To perceive means to immobilize. To say this is to say that we seize, in the act of perception, something which outruns perception itself."
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"Life does not proceed by the association and addition of elements, but by dissociation and division."
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"There is nothing [that] disarms us like laughter."
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"There is nothing in philosophy which could not be said in everyday language."
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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."
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