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.
Henri BergsonRead
And I also see how this body influences external images: it gives back movement to them.
Interpretation
The body plays a crucial role in shaping our perception of the world around us.
In this quote, Henri Bergson emphasizes the reciprocal relationship between the body and external images. He suggests that our physical existence not only perceives the world but also actively interprets and moves within it, highlighting the dynamic nature of perception and reality as influenced by our bodily experiences.
In practice
In a philosophy class discussing perception and reality.
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.
To exist is to change, to change is to mature, to mature is to go on creating oneself endlessly.
Laughter is the corrective force which prevents us from becoming cranks.
I believe that the time given to refutation in philosophy is usually time lost. Of the many attacks directed by many thinkers against each other, what now remains? Nothing, or assuredly very little. That which counts and endures is the modicum of positive truth which each contributes. The true statement is, of itself, able to displace the erroneous idea, and becomes, without our having taken the trouble of refuting anyone, the best of refutations.
Religion is to mysticism what popularization is to science
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.
Government control gives rise to fraud, suppression of Truth, intensification of the black market and artificial scarcity. Above all, it unmans the people and deprives them of initiative, it undoes the teaching of self-help.
It [feminism] is mixed up with a muddled idea that women are free when they serve their employers but slaves when they help their husbands.
My books are not 'political.' I don't make political demands. They actually describe life. But when we look at human life, politics creeps in everywhere.
Sympathy is what you have for someone after they die, pity you have for someone when they don't have a date to the biggest dance of the year. Empathy is what I do to you when you judge me. Envy is having pity on yourself. Can you discern the rest for yourself?
It is part of the irony of life that the strongest feelings of devoted gratitude of which human nature seems to be susceptible, are called forth in human beings towards those who, having the power entirely to crush their earthly existence, voluntarily refrain from using that power.
Deconstruction seems to offer a way out of the closure of knowledge. By inaugurating the open-ended indefiniteness of textuality-by thus 'placing in the abyss' (mettre en abime), as the French expression would literally have it-it shows us the lure of the abyss as freedom. The fall into the abyss of deconstruction inspires us with as much pleasure as fear. We are intoxicated with the prospect of never hitting bottom
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