Henri Bergson Short Quotes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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
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
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
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
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
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