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.
To exist is to change, to change is to mature, to mature is to go on creating oneself endlessly.
Some other faculty than the intellect is necessary for the apprehension of reality.
Think like a man of action, act like a man of thought.
The pure present is an ungraspable advance of the past devouring the future. In truth, all sensation is already memory.
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.
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.
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.
In laughter we always find an unavowed intention to humiliate and consequently to correct our neighbour.
Instinct perfected is a faculty of using and even constructing organized instruments; intelligence perfected is the faculty of making and using unorganized instruments.
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.
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.
It seems that laughter needs an echo.
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.
Homo sapiens, the only creature endowed with reason, is also the only creature to pin its existence on things unreasonable.
Genius is that which forces the inertia of humanity to learn.
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.
The only cure for vanity is laughter, and the only fault that is laughable is vanity.
Religion is to mysticism what popularization is to science.
I cannot escape the objection that there is no state of mind, however simple, that does not change every moment.
