Henri Bergson Quotes

45 Sourced Quotes

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

Henri Bergson
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.

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

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

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

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

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

Henri Bergson
Laughter has no greater foe than emotion.... To produce the whole of its effect, then, the comic demands something like a momentary anesthesia of the heart.

Henri Bergson
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.

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

Henri Bergson
When it is said that an object occupies a large space in the soul or even that it fills it entirely, we ought to understand by this simply that its image has altered the shade of a thousand perceptions or memories, and that in this sense it pervades them, although it does not itself come into view.

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

Henri Bergson
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
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?

Henri Bergson