"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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Quote collection
Henri Bergson quotes (page 3 of 4)
75 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"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."
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"And I also see how this body influences external images: it gives back movement to them."
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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."
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"I cannot escape the objection that there is no state of mind, however simple, that does not change every moment"
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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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"I believe I experience creativity at every moment of my life."
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"ACT as men of thought; THINK as men of action."
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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."
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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."
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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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"I see plainly how external images influence the image that I call my body : they transmit movement to it."
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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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"It seems that laughter needs an echo."
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"Wherever anything lives, there is, open somewhere, a register in which time is being inscribed."
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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."
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"The emotion felt by a man in the presence of nature certainly counts for something in the origin of religions."
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"Our laughter is always the laughter of a group."
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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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"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."
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