Great Throughts Treasury

"I would say act like a man of thought and think like a man of action."

"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."

"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."

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

"In reality, the past is preserved by itself automatically."

"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."

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

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

"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."

"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?"

"It seems that laughter needs an echo."

"Laughter is the corrective force which prevents us from becoming cranks."

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

"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."

"Might not certain vices have the same relation to character that the rigidity of a fixed idea as to intellect? Whether as a moral kink or a crooked twist given to the will, vice has often the appearance of a curvature for the soul. Doubtless there are vices into which the soul plunges deeply with all its pregnant potency, which it rejuvenates and drags along with it into a moving circle of reincarnations. Those are tragic vices. But the vice capable of making us comic is, on the contrary, that which is brought from without, like a ready-made frame into which we are to step. It lends us its own rigidity instead of borrowing from us our flexibility. We do not render it more complicated; on the contrary, it simplifies us. Here, as we shall see later in the concluding section of this study, lies the essential difference between comedy and drama. A drama, even when portraying passions or vices that bear a name, so completely incorporates them that the person is forgotten, their general characteristics effaced, and we no longer think of them at all, but rather of the person in whom they are assimilated; hence, the title of a drama can seldom be anything else than a proper noun. On the other hand, many comedies have a common noun as their title: L'Avare, Le Joueur etc."

"My body, an object destined to move other objects, is, then, a centre of action, it cannot give birth to a representation."

"Only those ideas that are least truly ours can be adequately expressed in words."

"Our laughter is always the laughter of a group."

"Religion is to mysticism what popularization is to science"

"Sex appeal is the keynote of our civilization"

"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."

"The body, by the place which at each moment it occupies in the universe, indicates the parts and the aspects of matter on which we can lay hold: our perception, which exactly measures our virtual action on things, thus limits itself to the objects which actually influence our organs and prepare our movements."

"The brain's function is to choose from the past, to diminish it, to simplify it, but not to preserve it."

"The essential function of the universe, which is a machine for making gods."

"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."

"The major task of the twentieth century will be to explore the unconscious, to investigate the subsoil of the mind."

"The motive power of democracy is love"

"The only cure for vanity is laughter, and the only fault that is laughable is vanity."

"The present contains nothing more than the past, and what is found in the effect was already in the cause."

"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."

"The pure present is an ungraspable advance of the past devouring the future. In truth all sensation is already memory."

"The universe is a machine for creating gods."

"The vital spirit. L'‚lan vital."

"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."

"There is nothing in philosophy which could not be said in everyday language."

"There is, beneath these sharply cut crystals and this frozen surface, a continuous flux which is not comparable to any flux I have ever seen. There is a succession of states, each of which announces that which follows and contains that which precedes it."

"Thus to seek with ready-made concepts to penetrate 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. . . ."

"To perceive means to immobilize. We seize, in the act of perception, something which outruns perception itself."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"Wherever anything lives, there is, open somewhere, a register in which time is being inscribed."

"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."