Henri Bergson Quotes

Fortunately, some are born with spiritual immune systems that sooner or later give rejection to the illusory worldview grafted upon then 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 the journey of awakening. Each step of the journey is made by following the heart instead of the crowd, and by choosing knowledge over veils of ignorance.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

Sex-appeal is the keynote of our whole civilization.

Intuition is a method of feeling one's way intellectually into the inner heart of a thing to locate what is unique and inexpressible in it.

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

The motive power of democracy is love

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

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.

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.

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

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

Intelligence is characterized by a natural incomprehension of life.

Religion is to mysticism what popularization is to science

To drive out the darkness, bring in the light.

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

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

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.

In reality, the past is preserved by itself automatically.

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.

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.

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 varying the manufacture.

The universe... is a machine for the making of gods.

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.

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

One can always reason with reason.

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.

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

To perceive means to immobilize. To say this is to say that we seize, in the act of perception, something which outruns perception itself.

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.

There is nothing [that] disarms us like laughter.

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

Knowledge, in so far as it is directed to practical matters, has only to enumerate the principal possible attitudes of the thing towards us, as well as our best possible attitude towards it. Therein lies the ordinary function of ready-made concepts, those stations with which we mark out the path of becoming. But to seek to penetrate with them 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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

It seems that laughter needs an echo.

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.

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

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

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