Philosophers From France

"Each one gave the other the only assistance one man can expect from another: that his friend support him and ask only that he remain himself. It is no great accomplishment to take people as they are, and we must always do so eventually, but to wish them to be as they are, that is a genuine love."

"Never be insolent unless it is a deliberate decision, and only toward a man more powerful than yourself."

"Untie, liberate, and do not be afraid. He who is free is disarmed."

"An author of antiquity said that every event has two handles, and that, in order to carry it, there is no sense in choosing the one that hurts the hand."

"Certainly thinking is pleasant, but the pleasure of thinking must be subordinated to the art of making decisions."

"Obligation spoils everything."

"Work is the best and worst of all things; the best of it is voluntary, the worst of it is servile."

"Every menial condition is bearable as long as one can exercise authority over one's work and be assured that the job is permanent."

"May the Gods, if they did not die of boredom, never give you one of those flat kingdoms to govern; may lead you through mountain paths; may they give you for a companion a good Andalusian mule with eyes like wells, a brow like an anvil, and who stops dead in his tracks because he sees the shadow his ears make on the road in front of him."

"We are advised and led along by second-rate moralists who only know how to work themselves into a delirium and pass their illness onto others."

"One must preach life, not death; spread hope, not fear and cultivate joy, man's most valuable treasure. That is the secret of the greatest of the wise, and it will be the light of tomorrow. Passions are sad. Hatred is sad. Joy destroys passions and hatred. Let us begin by telling ourselves that sadness is never noble, beautiful or useful."

"Our errors perish before we do. Let's not mummify them and keep them around."

"Everybody continually tries to get away with as much as he can; and society is a marvelous machine which allows decent people to be cruel without realizing it."

"We must clear away, simplify, eradicate."

"Politeness is for people toward whom we feel indifferent, and moods, both good and bad, are for those we love."

"Aristotle's pupil already realized that we have no power at all over our passions as long as we do not know their true causes. Many men have refuted fear, and with sound arguments. But a man who is afraid does not listen to arguments; he listens to the beating of his heart and the pulsating of his blood."

"It is clear that in mulling over harsh judgments, sinister predictions, and bad memories, we fashion our own sadness; in a certain sense, we savor it."

"Humanity will have to extricate itself from the bags created by false moralists, according to whom we taste happiness and then pass judgment on it, as if it were a piece of fruit. But I maintain that even for a piece of fruit we can do something to help it taste good. This is even truer of marriage and every other human relationship; these things are not meant to be tasted or passively accepted; they must be made. A relationship is not like a bit of shade where one is comfortable or uncomfortable depending on the weather and the way the wind is blowing. On the contrary, it is a place of miracles, where the magician makes the rain and the good weather."

"In short, the important thing is to get started. No matter how; then there will be time to ask yourself where you are going."

"It is the human condition to question one god after another, one appearance after another, or better, one apparition after another, always pursuing the truth of the imagination, which is not the same as the truth of appearance."

"When we speak, in gestures or signs, we fashion a real object in the world; the gesture is seen, the words and the song are heard. The arts are simply a kind of writing, which, in one way or another, fixes words or gestures, and gives body to the invisible."

"If religion is only human, and its form is man’s form, it follows that everything in religion is true."

"Man himself is an enigma in motion; his questions never stay asked; whereas the mold, the footprint, and by natural extension, the statue itself, like the vaults, the arches, the temples with which man records his own passing, remain immobile and fix a moment of man’s life, upon which one might endlessly meditate."

"When people ask me if the division between parties of the right and parties of the left, men of the right and men of the left, still makes sense, the first thing that comes to mind is that the person asking the question is certainly not a man of the left."

"As opposed to the incoherent spectacle of the world, the real is what is expected, what is obtained and what is discovered by our own movement. It is what is sensed as being within our own power and always responsive to our action."

"Any kind of barbarism, once established, will last."

"Rien n’est plus dangereux qu’une idèe, quand on n’a qu’une idèe."

"Every boat is copied from another boat... Let’s reason as follows in the manner of Darwin. It is clear that a very badly made boat will end up at the bottom after one or two voyages, and thus never be copied... One could then say, with complete rigor, that it is the sea herself who fashions the boats, choosing those which function and destroying the others."

"On prouve tout ce qu'on veut, et la vraie difficulté est de savoir ce qu'on veut prouver."

"Thought is saying no, and it is to itself that thought says no."

"To think is to say no."

"Idleness is the mother of all vices, but also of all virtues."

"In short, the anomaly of war is that the best men get themselves killed while crafty men find their chance to govern in a manner contrary to justice."

"As the [nineteenth] century progressed, we find that truth itself tended to be regarded no longer as eternal and changeless but as time-dependent. ...This radically new point of view received its extreme formulation in the philosophy of the 'modern Heraclitus', Henri Bergson... for whom ultimate reality was neither 'being' nor 'being changed' but the continual process of 'change' itself, which he called la durée. An authoritative critical account of Bergson's eloquently expressed philosophy... has been given by... Leszek Kolakowski... Bergson achieved the unique distinction of being both scathingly criticized by Bertrand Russel (in 1912) and having his books placed on the Index Prohibitorum by the Holy Office in 1914—the year he was elected a member of the Académie Française! A more scientifically oriented philosophy of change than Bergon's was developed between the wars by... A. N. Whitehead... particularly in his book Process and Reality..."

"The philosophy of Bergson, which is a spiritualist restoration, essentially mystical, medieval, Quixotesque, has been called a demi-mondaine philosophy. Leave out the demi; call it mondaine, mundane. Mundane — yes, a philosophy for the world and not for philosophers, just as chemistry ought to be not for chemists alone. The world desires illusion (mundus vult decipi) — either the illusion antecedent to reason, which is poetry, or the illusion subsequent to reason, which is religion."

"The clock... is a piece of power-machinery whose "product" is seconds and minutes: by its essential nature it dissociated time from human events and helped create the belief in an independent world of mathematically measurable sequences: the special world of science. ...while human life has regularities of its own... time is measured not by the calendar but by the events that occupy it. ...if growth has its own duration and regularities, behind it are not simply matter and motion but the facts of development: in short, history. And while mechanical time is strung out in a succession of mathematically isolated instants, organic time—what Bergson calls duration—is cumulative in its effects. ...organic time moves only in one direction—through the cycle of birth, growth, development, decay, and death—and the past that is already dead remains present in the future that has still to be born."

"1919...Henri Bergson, Karl Barth, Ernst Cassirer, Havelock Ellis, Karl Jaspers, John Maynard Keynes, Rudolf Steiner—indelible figures—were all active in their various spheres."

"One of the bad effects of an anti-intellectual philosophy, such as that of Bergson, is that it thrives upon the errors and confusions of the intellect. Hence it is led to prefer bad thinking to good, to declare every momentary difficulty insoluble, and to regard every foolish mistake as revealing the bankruptcy of intellect and the triumph of intuition. There are in Bergson’s works many allusions to mathematics and science, and to a careless reader these allusions may seem to strengthen his philosophy greatly. As regards science, especially biology and physiology, I am not competent to criticize his interpretations. But as regards mathematics, he has deliberately preferred traditional errors in interpretation to the more modern views which have prevailed among mathematicians for the last eighty years. In this matter, he has followed the example of most philosophers. In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the infinitesimal calculus, though well developed as a method, was supported, as regards its foundations, by many fallacies and much confused thinking. Hegel and his followers seized upon these fallacies and confusions, to support them in their attempt to prove all mathematics self-contradictory. Thence the Hegelian account of these matters passed into the current thought of philosophers, where it has remained long after the mathematicians have removed all the difficulties upon which the philosophers rely. And so long as the main object of philosophers is to show that nothing can be learned by patience and detailed thinking, but that we ought rather to worship the prejudices of the ignorant under the title of ‘reason’ if we are Hegelians, or of ‘intuition’ if we are Bergsonians, so long philosophers will take care to remain ignorant of what mathematicians have done to remove the errors by which Hegel profited."

"The eyes see only what the mind is prepared to comprehend."

"Fortunately, some are born with spiritual immune systems that sooner or later give rejection to the illusory worldview grafted upon them from birth through social conditioning. They begin sensing that something is amiss, and start looking for answers. Inner knowledge and anomalous outer experiences show them a side of reality others are oblivious to, and so begins their journey of awakening. Each step of the journey is made by following the heart instead of following the crowd and by choosing knowledge over ignorance."

"Men do not sufficiently realise 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 their refractory planet, the essential function of the universe, which is a machine for the making of gods (la fonction essentielle de l'universe, qui est une machine à faire des dieux)."

"Berkeley, Hume, Kant, Fichte, Hegel, James, Bergson all are united in one earnest attempt, the attempt to reinstate man with his high spiritual claims in a place of importance in the cosmic scheme."

"Thérèse of Lisieux was one of the sources of inspiration for the philosopher Henri Bergson during the final stage of his search, in which he found God thanks to the testimony of mystics."

"Toute notre civilisation est aphrodisiaque"

"The remembrance of forbidden fruit is the earliest thing in the memory of each of us, as it is in that of mankind."

"Why did we obey? The question hardly occurred to us. We had formed the habit of deferring to our parents and teachers. All the same we knew very well that it was because they were our parents, because they were our teachers. Therefore, in our eyes, their authority came less from themselves than from their status in relation to us"

"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."

"The spectacle of what religions have been in the past, of what certain religions still are to-day, is indeed humiliating for human intelligence. What a farrago of error and folly!'"

"Un philosophe digne de ce nom n'a jamais dit qu'une seule chose : encore a-t-il plutôt cherché à la dire qu'il ne l'a dite véritablement. Et il n'a dit qu'une seule chose parce qu'il n'a su qu'un seul point : encore fut-ce moins une vision qu'un contact..."

"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."