Henri Bergson Quotes
"Wherever anything lives, there is, open somewhere, a register in which time is being inscribed."
- Henri Bergson
(Related: Time, Being, Open)
"Some other faculty than the intellect is necessary for the apprehension of reality."
- Henri Bergson
(Related: Intellect, Reality)
"Sex appeal is the keynote of our civilization."
- Henri Bergson
(Related: Sex, Civilization, Sex appeal)
"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
(Related: Freedom, Perceptions, Spirit)
"The major task of the twentieth century will be to explore the unconscious, to investigate the subsoil of the mind."
- Henri Bergson
(Related: Mind, Unconscious, Will)
"The motive power of democracy is love."
- Henri Bergson
(Related: Love, Power, Democracy, Motive)
"The only cure for vanity is laughter, and the only fault that is laughable is vanity."
- Henri Bergson
(Related: Cure, Fault, Laughter, Vanity)
"There is no greater joy than that of feeling oneself a creator. The triumph of life is expressed by creation."
- Henri Bergson
(Related: Life, Creation, Feeling, Joy)
"There is nothing in philosophy which could not be said in everyday language."
- Henri Bergson
(Related: Language, Nothing, Philosophy)
"Think like a man of action, act like a man of thought."
- Henri Bergson
(Related: Thought, Action, Man)
"To exist is to change, to change is to mature, to mature is to go on creating oneself endlessly."
- Henri Bergson
(Related: Change)
"To perceive means to immobilize... we seize, in the act of perception, something which outruns perception itself."
- Henri Bergson
(Related: Perception, Act)
"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
(Related: Intelligence, Inferiority, Superiority, Man)
"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
(Related: Life, Imagination, Perception, Vision, Will)
"Religion is to mysticism what popularization is to science."
- Henri Bergson
(Related: Religion, Science)
"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
(Related: Action, Perception, Beginning, Body, Sense, State)
"Genius is that which forces the inertia of humanity to learn."
- Henri Bergson
(Related: Genius, Humanity)
"Our laughter is always the laughter of a group."
- Henri Bergson
(Related: Laughter)
"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
(Related: Events)
"And I also see how this body influences external images: it gives back movement to them."
- Henri Bergson
(Related: Body)
"An absolute can only be given in an intuition, while all the rest has to do with analysis."
- Henri Bergson
(Related: Intuition, Rest)
"Homo sapiens, the only creature endowed with reason, is also the only creature to pin its existence on things unreasonable."
- Henri Bergson
(Related: Existence, Reason)
"I cannot escape the objection that there is no state of mind, however simple, that does not change every moment."
- Henri Bergson
(Related: Change, Mind, State)
"I see plainly how external images influence the image that I call my body: they transmit movement to it."
- Henri Bergson
(Related: Influence)
"It seems that laughter needs an echo."
- Henri Bergson
(Related: Echo, Laughter, Needs)
"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
(Related: Art, Attitude, Eye, Man)
"In laughter we always find an unavowed intention to humiliate and consequently to correct our neighbour."
- Henri Bergson
(Related: Intention, Laughter)
"In reality, the past is preserved by itself automatically."
- Henri Bergson
(Related: Past, Reality)
"Life does not proceed by the association and addition of elements, but by dissociation and division."
- Henri Bergson
(Related: Life)
"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
(Related: Intelligence, Instinct)
"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
(Related: Life, Growth)
"Intelligence is the faculty of making artificial objects, especially tools to make tools."
- Henri Bergson
(Related: Intelligence, Tools)
"In its entirety, probably, it follows us at every instant; 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
(Related: Thought, Consciousness, Present)