Henri Bergson Quotes

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

One can always reason with reason.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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?

It seems that laughter needs an echo.

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.

ACT as men of thought; THINK as men of action.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

Our laughter is always the laughter of a group.

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

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

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

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

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.

The vital spirit. L'élan vital