Henri Bergson Quotes

45 Sourced Quotes

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

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

Henri Bergson
For a conscious being, to exist is to change, to change is to mature, to mature is to go on creating oneself endlessly.

Henri Bergson
My curse upon your venom'd stang, That shoots my tortur'd gooms alang, An' thro' my lug gies monie a twang Wi' gnawing vengeance, Tearing my nerves wi' bitter pang, Like racking engines!

Henri Bergson
For it is scarcely possible to give any other definition of space: space is what enables us to distinguish a number of identical and simultaneous sensations from one another; it is thus a principle of differentiation, and consequently it is a reality with no quality.

Henri Bergson
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
The universe is not made, but is being made continually. It is growing, perhaps indefinitely....

Henri Bergson
The universe is simmering down, like a giant stew left to cook for four billion years. Sooner or later we won't be able to tell the carrots from the onions.

Henri Bergson
I pass from state to state. I am warm or cold, I am merry or sad, I work or I do nothing, I look at what is around me or I think of something else. Sensations, feelings, volitions, ideas - such are the changes into which my existence is divided and which color it in turns. I change, then, without ceasing.

Henri Bergson
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
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
Evolution does not mark out a solitary route... it takes directions without aiming at ends, and... it remains inventive even in its adaptations.

Henri Bergson
Science has equipped man in less than fifty years with more tools than he had made during the thousands of years he had lived on earth. Each new machine being for man a new organ — an artificial organ — his body became suddenly and prodigiously increased in size, without his soul being at the same time able to dilate to the dimensions of his body.

Henri Bergson
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
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
Time is an invention or it is nothing at all. But of timeinvention physics can take no account... Modern physics... rests altogether on a substitution of time-length for time-invention.

Henri Bergson
Life is like a current passing from germ to germ through the medium of a developed organism.

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

Henri Bergson
Calculation touches, at most, certain phenomena of organic destruction. Organic creation, on the contrary, the evolutionary phenomena which properly constitute life, we cannot in any way subject to mathematical treatment.

Henri Bergson
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
The metaphor never goes very far, anymore than a curve can long be confused with its tangent.

Henri Bergson
The prestige of the Nobel Prize is due to many causes, but in particular to its twofold idealistic and international character: idealistic in that it has been designed for works of lofty inspiration; international in that it is awarded after the production of different countries has been minutely studied and the intellectual balance sheet of the whole world has been drawn up. Free from all other considerations and ignoring any but intellectual values, the judges have deliberately taken their place in what the philosophers have called a community of the mind.

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

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

Henri Bergson
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.

Henri Bergson