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

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.

Let schoolmasters puzzle their brain, With grammar, and nonsense, and learning, Good liquor, I stoutly maintain, Gives genius a better discerning.

Clinton's fakery was so deft and deeply ingrained that it was impossible to tell where it ended and the real Bill Clinton began. This constituted a kind of political genius.

Genius is not a possession of the limited few, but exists in some degree in everyone. Where there is natural growth, a full and free play of faculties, genius will manifest itself.

I make no claim to being a business genius. You can make so much money in this business that it loses its value.

Genius is an infinite capacity for taking pains.

Doorman - a genius who can open the door of your car with one hand, help you in with the other, and still have one left for the tip.

Doing easily what others find difficult is talent; doing what is impossible for talent is genius.

I am a genius. Then it amused me to keep saying so, but now it does not. I expected to be happy sometime. Now I know I shall never be.