Top 85 Quotes & Sayings by Henri Bergson

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

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

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.

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.

In reality, the past is preserved by itself automatically.

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.

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

Religion is to mysticism what popularization is to science.

The only cure for vanity is laughter, and the only fault that is laughable is vanity.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Think like a man of action, act like a man of thought.

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

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.

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

It seems that laughter needs an echo.

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

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

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

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.

Our laughter is always the laughter of a group.

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.

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.

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

The motive power of democracy is love.

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.

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

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

Sex appeal is the keynote of our civilization.

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

Religion is to mysticism what popularization is to science

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.

One can always reason with reason.

All the living hold together, and all yield to the same tremendous push. The animal takes its stand on the plant, man bestrides animality, and the whole of humanity, in space and in time, is one immense army galloping beside and before and behind each of us in an overwhelming charge able to beat down every resistance and clear the most formidable obstacles, perhaps even death.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

To drive out the darkness, bring in the light.

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

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.

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

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

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

Intelligence is characterized by a natural incomprehension of life.

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.

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.

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

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.

Sex-appeal is the keynote of our whole civilization.