Henri Bergson famous quotes

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

#Inspirational #Motivational #Change

Fortunately, some are born with spiritual immune systems that sooner or later give rejection to the illusory worldview grafted upon them from birth through social conditioning. They begin sensing that something is amiss, and start looking for answers. Inner knowledge and anomalous outer experiences show them a side of reality others are oblivious to, and so begins their journey of awakening. Each step of the journey is made by following the heart instead of following the crowd and by choosing knowledge over the veils of ignorance.
-- Henri Bergson

#Motivational #Spiritual #Ignorance

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

#Doubt #Atheism #Reason

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

#Time #Past #Causes

Sex-appeal is the keynote of our whole civilization.
-- Henri Bergson

#Sex #Civilization #Appeals

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

#Inspirational #Life #Philosophical

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

#Philosophical #Tools #Faculty

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.
-- Henri Bergson

#Independent #Two #Events

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

#Philosophical #Giving #Movement

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

#Philosophical #Simple #Mind

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

#Creativity #Joy #Feelings

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

#Reality #Faculty #Intellect

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

#Intuition #Analysis #Instinct

It seems that laughter needs an echo.
-- Henri Bergson

#Laughter #Philosophical #Echoes

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.
-- Henri Bergson

#Dream #Reality #Ideas

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

#Art #Work #Personality

The motive power of democracy is love
-- Henri Bergson

#Philosophical #Democracy #Motive

In reality, the past is preserved by itself automatically.
-- Henri Bergson

#Philosophical #Past #Reality

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

#Ideas

Religion is to mysticism what popularization is to science
-- Henri Bergson

#Philosophical #Mysticism

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

#Laughter #Becoming #Crank

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

#Art #Communication #Reality

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

#Philosophical #Movement #Body

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

#Philosophical #Mind #Tasks

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

#Perception #Movement #Matter

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

#Philosophy #Everyday #Language

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

#Imagination #Perception #Vision

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.
-- Henri Bergson

#Moving #Action #Habit

The vital spirit. L'élan vital
-- Henri Bergson

#Spirit

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

#Mean #Perception #Perceive

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

#Nature #Real #Order

There is nothing [that] disarms us like laughter.
-- Henri Bergson

#Laughter

... divine love is not something belonging to God: it is God Himself.
-- Henri Bergson

#Love #Divine #Belonging

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

#Nature #Men #Emotion

On the other hand, the pleasure caused by laughter, even on the stage, is not an unadulterated enjoyment; it is not a pleasure that is exclusively esthetic or altogether disinterested. It always implies a secret or unconscious intent, if not of each one of us, at all events of society as a whole. In laughter we always find an unavowed intention to humiliate, and consequently to correct our neighbour, if not in his will, at least in his deed.
-- Henri Bergson

#Laughter #Hands #Secret

Laughter appears to stand in need of an echo, Listen to it carefully: it is not an articulate, clear, well-defined sound; it is something which would fain be prolonged by reverberating from one to another, something beginning with a crash, to continue in successive rumblings, like thunder in a mountain.
-- Henri Bergson

#Laughter #Echoes #Mountain

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.
-- Henri Bergson

#Laughter #Kindness #Taken

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

#Reality #Soul #Realism

One can always reason with reason.
-- Henri Bergson

#Reason #Mathematician

Intelligence is characterized by a natural incomprehension of life.
-- Henri Bergson

#Wisdom #Intelligence #Natural

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

#Men #Essence #Definitions

An absolute can only be given in an intuition, while all the rest has to do with analysis. We call intuition here the sympathy by which one is transported into the interior of an object in order to coincide with what there is unique andconsequently inexpressible in it. Analysis, on the contrary, is the operation which reduces the object to elements already known.
-- Henri Bergson

#Unique #Order #Intuition

Our laughter is always the laughter of a group.
-- Henri Bergson

#Happiness #Laughter #Joy

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

#Laughter #Real #Secret

...Men do not sufficiently realize that their future is in their own hands. Theirs is the task of determining first of all whether they want to go on living or not. Theirs is the responsibility, then, for deciding if they want merely to live, or intend to make just the extra effort required for fulfilling, even on this refractory planet, the essential function of the universe, which is a machine for the making of gods.
-- Henri Bergson

#Responsibility #Men #Hands

The only cure for vanity is laughter. And the only fault that's laughable is vanity.
-- Henri Bergson

#Laughter #Humble #Vanity

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

#Laughter #Intention #Neighbour

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.
-- Henri Bergson

#War #Men #Self

The universe is a machine for the making of Gods.
-- Henri Bergson

#Machines #Universe

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.
-- Henri Bergson

#Running #Art #Attitude

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.
-- Henri Bergson

#Memories #Views #Space

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.
-- Henri Bergson

#Psychics #Degrees #Different

Genius is that which forces the inertia of humanity to learn.
-- Henri Bergson

#Humanity #Genius #Force

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

#Life #Doe #Division

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.
-- Henri Bergson

#Life #Creating #Essence

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.
-- Henri Bergson

#Past #Survival #Desire

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

#Art #Reality #Order

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

#Time #Register

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?
-- Henri Bergson

#Children #Hands #Trying

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.
-- Henri Bergson

#Philosophy #Believe #Taken

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

#Intuition #Instinct #Faculty

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.
-- Henri Bergson

#House #Perception #Body

Intuition is a method of feeling one's way intellectually into the inner heart of a thing, in order to locate what is unique and inexpressible in it. If there is a way of grasping a reality in absolute rather than relative terms, of entering into it rather than taking up positions on it, of seizing hold of it without any translation or symbolism, then that way is metaphysics itself.
-- Henri Bergson

#Heart #Unique #Reality

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.
-- Henri Bergson

#Faith #Giving #Add

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.
-- Henri Bergson

#Intelligence #Tools #Faculty