Henri Bergson Quotes

#1. To perceive means to immobilize ... we seize, in the act of perception, something which outruns perception itself. - Author: Henri Bergson

#2. I see plainly how external images influence the image that I call my body: they transmit movement to it. - Author: Henri Bergson

#3. One can always reason with reason. - Author: Henri Bergson

#4. The emotion felt by a man in the presence of nature certainly counts for something in the origin of religions. - Author: Henri Bergson

#5. An absolute can only be given in an intuition, while all the rest has to do with analysis. - Author: Henri Bergson

#6. 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. - Author: Henri Bergson

#7. 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. - Author: Henri Bergson

#8. In laughter we always find an unavowed intention to humiliate and consequently to correct our neighbour. - Author: Henri Bergson

#9. Our laughter is always the laughter of a group. - Author: Henri Bergson

#10. There is nothing in philosophy which could not be said in everyday language. - Author: Henri Bergson

#11. 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. - Author: Henri Bergson

#12. The present contains nothing more than the past, and what is found in the effect was already in the cause. - Author: Henri Bergson

#13. There is no greater joy than that of feeling oneself a creator. The triumph of life is expressed by creation. - Author: Henri Bergson

#14. 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. - Author: Henri Bergson

#15. Divine love is not something belonging to God: it is God Himself. - Author: Henri Bergson

#16. Is it astonishing that, like children trying to catch smoke by closing their hands, philosophers so often see the object they would grasp fly before them? - Author: Henri Bergson

#17. Action on the move creates its own route, creates to a very great extent the conditions under which it is to be fulfilled and thus baffles all calculation. - Author: Henri Bergson

#18. The question is precisely to know whether the past has ceased to exist, or ceased to be useful ... - Author: Henri Bergson

#19. Only those ideas that are least truly ours can be adequately expressed in words. - Author: Henri Bergson

#20. The world that our senses and our consciousness habitually acquaint us with is now nothing more than the shadow of itself; and it is cold like death. - Author: Henri Bergson

#21. Religion is to mysticism what popularization is to science. - Author: Henri Bergson

#22. Sex appeal is the keynote of our civilization. - Author: Henri Bergson

#23. The motive power of democracy is love. - Author: Henri Bergson

#24. The idea of the future, pregnant with an infinity of possibilities, is thus more fruitful than the future itself, and this is why we find more charm in hope than in possession, in dreams than in reality. - Author: Henri Bergson

#25. Laughter is, above all, a corrective. Being intended to humiliate, it must make a painful impression on the person against whom it is directed. By laughter, society avenges itself for the liberties taken with it. It would fail in its object if it bore the stamp of sympathy or kindness. - Author: Henri Bergson

#26. Genius is that which forces the inertia of humanity to learn. - Author: Henri Bergson

#27. Europe is overpopulated, the world will soon be in the same condition, and if the self-reproduction of man is not rationalized ... we shall have war. - Author: Henri Bergson

#28. That diversion of life towards mechanism is the real cause of laughter - Author: Henri Bergson

#29. 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. - Author: Henri Bergson

#30. And I also see how this body influences external images: it gives back movement to them. - Author: Henri Bergson

#31. The only cure for vanity is laughter, and the only fault that is laughable is vanity. - Author: Henri Bergson

#32. All the translations of a poem in all possible languages may add nuance to nuance and, by a kind of mutual retouching, by correcting one another, may give an increasingly faithful picture of the poem they translate, yet they will never give the inner meaning of the original. - Author: Henri Bergson

#33. In short, intelligence, considered in what seems to be its original feature, is the faculty of manufacturing artificial objects, especially tools to make tools, and of indefinitely urging the manufacture. - Author: Henri Bergson

#34. Some other faculty than the intellect is necessary for the apprehension of reality. - Author: Henri Bergson

#35. [Duration is] the form which the succession of our conscious states assumes when our ego lets itself live, when it refrains from separating its present state from its former state. - Author: Henri Bergson

#36. Darwin's theory of evolution pointed to the conclusion that flux (or becoming), not being, is the essence of reality. Though - Author: Henri Bergson

#37. However spontaneous it seems, laughter always implies a kind of secret freemasonry, or even complicity, with other laughers, real or imaginary. - Author: Henri Bergson

#38. 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. - Author: Henri Bergson

#39. I believe I experience creativity at every moment of my life. - Author: Henri Bergson

#40. We are free when our actions emanate from our total personality, when they express it, when they resemble it in the indefinable way a work of art sometimes does the artist. - Author: Henri Bergson

#41. Homo sapiens, the only creature endowed with reason, is also the only creature to pin its existence on things unreasonable. - Author: Henri Bergson

#42. The major task of the twentieth century will be to explore the unconscious, to investigate the subsoil of the mind. - Author: Henri Bergson

#43. Thus to seek with ready-made concepts to penetrate into the inmost nature of things is to apply to the mobility of the real a method created in order to give stationary points of observation on it ... - Author: Henri Bergson

#44. It is of man's essence to create materially and morally, to fabricate things and to fabricate himself. Homo faber is the definition I propose ... Homo faber, Homo sapiens, I pay my respects to both, for they tend to merge. - Author: Henri Bergson

#45. I cannot escape the objection that there is no state of mind, however simple, that does not change every moment. - Author: Henri Bergson

#46. If reality impacted directly on our senses and our consciousness, if we could have direct communication between the material world and ourselves, art would be unnecessary. - Author: Henri Bergson

#47. Life does not proceed by the association and addition of elements, but by dissociation and division. - Author: Henri Bergson

#48. The universe is a machine for the making of Gods. - Author: Henri Bergson

#49. 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. - Author: Henri Bergson

#50. Realism is in the work when idealism is in the soul, and it is only through idealism that we resume contact with reality. - Author: Henri Bergson

#51. Art has no other object than to set aside the symbols of practical utility, the generalities that are conventionally and socially accepted, everything in fact which masks reality from us, in order to set us face to face with reality itself. - Author: Henri Bergson

#52. To exist is to change, to change is to mature, to mature is to go on creating oneself endlessly. - Author: Henri Bergson

#53. Intelligence is the faculty of making artificial objects, especially tools to make tools. - Author: Henri Bergson

#54. Time is invention and nothing else. - Author: Henri Bergson

#55. Laughter is the corrective force which prevents us from becoming cranks. - Author: Henri Bergson

#56. To drive out the darkness, bring in the light. - Author: Henri Bergson

#57. Intelligence is characterized by a natural incomprehension of life. - Author: Henri Bergson

#58. 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. - Author: Henri Bergson

#59. It is the very essence of intelligence to coordinate means with a view to a remote end, and to undertake what it does not feel absolutely sure of carrying out. - Author: Henri Bergson

#60. The movement of the stream is distinct from the river bed, although it must adopt its winding course. - Author: Henri Bergson

#61. What philosophy has lacked most of all is precision. - Author: Henri Bergson

#62. There is nothing [that] disarms us like laughter. - Author: Henri Bergson

#63. Wherever anything lives, there is, open somewhere, a register in which time is being inscribed. - Author: Henri Bergson

#64. 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. - Author: Henri Bergson

#65. Creation signifies, above all, emotion, and that not in literature or art alone. We all know the concentration and effort implied in scientific discovery. Genius has been defined as an infinite capacity for taking pains. - Author: Henri Bergson

#66. ACT as men of thought; THINK as men of action. - Author: Henri Bergson

#67. It seems that laughter needs an echo. - Author: Henri Bergson

#68. 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. - Author: Henri Bergson

#69. No two moments are identical in a conscious being - Author: Henri Bergson

#70. Instinct perfected is a faculty of using and even constructing organized instruments; intelligence perfected is the faculty of making and using unorganized instruments. - Author: Henri Bergson

#71. It is emotion that drives the intelligence forward in spite of obstacles. - Author: Henri Bergson

#72. In reality, the past is preserved by itself automatically. - Author: Henri Bergson

#73. Sex-appeal is the keynote of our whole civilization. - Author: Henri Bergson

#74. The pure present is an ungraspable advance of the past devouring the future. In truth, all sensation is already memory. - Author: Henri Bergson

#75. 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. - Author: Henri Bergson

#76. To ease another's burden, help to carry it. - Author: Henri Bergson