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

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

It seems that laughter needs an echo.

Think like a man of action, act like a man of thought.

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

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

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.

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

There is no greater joy than that of feeling oneself a creator. The triumph of life is expressed by creation.

The motive power of democracy is love.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Our laughter is always the laughter of a group.

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.

Religion is to mysticism what popularization is to science.

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

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.

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

In reality, the past is preserved by itself automatically.

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.

Some other faculty than the intellect is necessary for the apprehension of 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.

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.

Sex appeal is the keynote of our civilization.

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.

Genius is that which forces the inertia of humanity to learn.

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

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

To exist is to change to change is to mature to mature is to go on creating oneself endlessly

Laughter appears to stand in need of an echo.

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.

Realism is in the work when idealism is in the soul, and it is only through idealism that we resume contact with reality.

The movement of the stream is distinct from the river bed, although it must adopt its winding course.

Even if you walk exactly the same route each time - as with a sonnet - the events along the route cannot be imagined to be the same from day to day, as the poet's health, sight, his anticipations, moods, fears, thoughts cannot be the same.

The French are the wittiest, the most charming, and up to the present, at all events, the least musical race on Earth.

A lot of people have gotten into comedy because of certain influences in their lives or events that were painful, and I really have wracked my brain to figure it out. I pretty much have had a normal childhood. Maybe it was too normal.

I've done a lot of Super Bowls and appeared in a lot of big, big events and places and the Masters and what have you, but there was nothing as intimidating as speaking with Billy Graham.

Big shows are more like events and small shows are more like traditional gigs.

I like to create imaginary characters and events around a real historical situation. I want readers to feel: OK, this probably didn't happen, but it might have.

We not only interpret the character of events... we may also interpret our interpretations.

Every person, all the events of your life are there because you have drawn them there. What you choose to do with them is up to you.