The vital spirit. L'élan vital

It is with our entire past ... that we desire, will and act ... from this survival of the past it follows that consciousness cannot go through the same state twice. The circumstances may still be the same, but they will act no longer on the same person ... that is why our duration is irreversible.

The emotion felt by a man in the presence of nature certainly counts for something in the origin of religions.

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

I would say act like a man of thought and think like a man of action.

Instinct perfected is a faculty of using and even constructing organized instruments; intelligence perfected is the faculty of making and using unorganized instruments.

When it is said that an object occupies a large space in the soul or even that it fills it entirely, we ought to understand by this simply that its image has altered the shade of a thousand perceptions or memories, and that in this sense it pervades them, although it does not itself come into view.