Henri Bergson quotes | Thousands Of Quotes

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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.

Intelligence is the faculty of making artificial objects, especially tools to make tools.

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.

Instinct perfected is a faculty of using and even constructing organized instruments; intelligence perfected is the faculty of making and using unorganized instruments.

Life does not proceed by the association and addition of elements, but by dissociation and division.

In reality, the past is preserved by itself automatically.

In laughter we always find an unavowed intention to humiliate and consequently to correct our neighbour.

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.

It seems that laughter needs an echo.

I see plainly how external images influence the image that I call my body: they transmit movement to it.

I cannot escape the objection that there is no state of mind, however simple, that does not change every moment.

Homo sapiens, the only creature endowed with reason, is also the only creature to pin its existence on things unreasonable.

An absolute can only be given in an intuition, while all the rest has to do with analysis.

And I also see how this body influences external images: it gives back movement to them.

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.