Henri Bergson - Creative Evolution (1907)

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

Henri Bergson