p.47 each action is the realization of an intention.
p.93 Organization can therefore only be studied scientifically if the organized body has first been likened
to a machine... the materiality of this machine does not represent a sum of the means employed, but a sum of obstacles
avoided
p.93 The vision of a living being is an effective vision,
limited to objects on which the being can act
p.115 The substances forming the food of animals are just such reservoirs. Made of very complex molecules
holding considerable amount of chemical energy in the potential state, that are like explosives which only need a spark to
set free the energy stored within them.
p.133 By success must be understood, so far as the living being is concerned, an
aptitude to develop in the most diverse environments, through the greatest possible variety of obstacles
p.155 That which really moves in action interests us only so far as the whole can be advanced, retarded,
or stopped by any incident that may happen on the way.
p.155 Intelligence, in its natural state, aims at a practically useful end. When it substitutes for movement
immobilities put together, it does not pretend to reconstitute the movement such as it actually is; it merely replaces it
with a practical equivalent... Of immobility alone does the intellect form a clear idea.
p.179 Throughout the whole extent of the animal kingdom, we have said, consciousness
seems proportionate to the living being's power of choice. It lights up the zone of potentialities that surround the
act. It fills the interval between what is done and what might be done... we may regard is as a simple aid to action,
a light that action kindles, a momentary spark flying up from the friction of real action against possible actions.
p.263-264 consciousness corresponds exactly to the living being's power of choice; it is co-extensive with
the fringe of possible action that surrounds the real action: consciousness is synonymous with invention and with freedom.
p.273 All action aims at getting something that we feel the want of, or
at creating something that does not yet exist.
p.297 Now, it is unquestionable, as we remarked above, that every human action has its starting-point
in a dissatisfaction, and thereby a feeling of absence... we seek a thing only because we feel the lack of it... The
truth is that the "nothing" concerned here is the absence not so much of a thing as of a utility.
p.297-298 In a general way, human work consists in creating utility; and, as long as the
work is not done, there is "nothing" - nothing that we want. Our life is thus spent in filling voids, which our intellect
conceives under the influence, by no means intellectual, of desires and of regret, under
the pressure of vital necessities; and if we mean by void an absence of utility and not of things, we may say, in
this quite relative sense, that we are constantly going from the void to the full: such is the direction
which our action takes.
