Henri Bergson Quotes

45 Sourced Quotes

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

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

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

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
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 the responsibility, then, for deciding if they want merely to live, or intend to make just the extra effort required for fulfilling, even on their refractory planet, the essential function of the universe, which is a machine for the making of gods (la fonction essentielle de l'universe, qui est une machine à faire des dieux).

Henri Bergson
Only those ideas which least belong to us can be adequately expressed in words.

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

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

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

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

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

Henri Bergson
The movement of the stream is distinct from the river bed, although it must adopt its winding course.

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

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