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Laughter is the corrective force which prevents us from becoming cranks.
Henri Bergson
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Interpretation

What this quote means

Laughter helps to keep our perspectives in check, preventing us from becoming overly serious or rigid in our thinking.

Henri Bergson's quote suggests that laughter acts as a balancing mechanism in our lives, allowing us to maintain a sense of humor and perspective. It serves as a reminder not to take ourselves too seriously and to embrace the absurdities of life, which can help us avoid becoming narrow-minded or overly dogmatic.

Themes

LaughterHumorPerspectiveBalanceLife

In practice

Example use cases

This quote can be shared during a speech about the importance of humor in the workplace.

More from Henri Bergson

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.
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To exist is to change, to change is to mature, to mature is to go on creating oneself endlessly.
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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.
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Religion is to mysticism what popularization is to science
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And I also see how this body influences external images: it gives back movement to them.
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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.
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