Henri L Bergson Quotes

#1. 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.

Henri Bergson

#2. Intelligence is characterized by a natural incomprehension of life.

Henri Bergson

#3. To drive out the darkness, bring in the light.

Henri Bergson

#4. Laughter is the corrective force which prevents us from becoming cranks.

Henri Bergson

#5. Time is invention and nothing else.

Henri Bergson

#6. Intelligence is the faculty of making artificial objects, especially tools to make tools.

Henri Bergson

#7. To exist is to change, to change is to mature, to mature is to go on creating oneself endlessly.

Henri Bergson

#8. 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.

Henri Bergson

#9. Realism is in the work when idealism is in the soul, and it is only through idealism that we resume contact with reality.

Henri Bergson

#10. I believe I experience creativity at every moment of my life.

Henri Bergson

#11. The universe is a machine for the making of Gods.

Henri Bergson

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

Henri Bergson

#13. 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.

Henri Bergson

#14. Think like a man of action, act like a man of thought. - Henri Bergson

David Allen

#15. I cannot escape the objection that there is no state of mind, however simple, that does not change every moment.

Henri Bergson

#16. 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.

Henri Bergson

#17. 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 ...

Henri Bergson

#18. The major task of the twentieth century will be to explore the unconscious, to investigate the subsoil of the mind.

Henri Bergson

#19. Homo sapiens, the only creature endowed with reason, is also the only creature to pin its existence on things unreasonable.

Henri Bergson

#20. 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.

Henri Bergson

#21. 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.

Henri Bergson

#22. To ease another's burden, help to carry it.

Henri Bergson

#23. 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.

Henri Bergson

#24. The pure present is an ungraspable advance of the past devouring the future. In truth, all sensation is already memory.

Henri Bergson

#25. Sex-appeal is the keynote of our whole civilization.

Henri Bergson

#26. In reality, the past is preserved by itself automatically.

Henri Bergson

#27. It is emotion that drives the intelligence forward in spite of obstacles.

Henri Bergson

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

Henri Bergson

#29. No two moments are identical in a conscious being

Henri Bergson

#30. 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.

Henri Bergson