Bergson Quotes & Sayings

Religion is to mysticism what popularization is to science. — Henri Bergson

Berkeley , Hume, Kant , Fichte , Hegel , James , Bergson all are united in one earnest attempt, the attempt to reinstate man with his high spiritual claims in a place of importance in the cosmic scheme. — David Hume

But since the time of Leibnitz, it is hard to find philosophers who stress relatedness in any way. There is Henri Bergson, and before him the romantics, and Marx with his talk of the brotherhood of revolution, and Martin Buber with his I and Thou, but by and large modern philosophy is about aloneness. We are forlorn, abandoned. — Stuart Miller

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

To perceive means to immobilize ... we seize, in the act of perception, something which outruns perception itself. — Henri Bergson

Discord occasions a momentary distress to the ear, which remains unsatisfied, and even uneasy, until it hears something better. I am convinced ... that provided the ear be at length made amends, there are few dissonances too strong for it. Disharmony, to paraphrase Bergson's statement about disorder, is simply a harmony to which many are unaccustomed. — John Cage

To ease another's burden, help to carry it. — Henri Bergson

Many people come and go,
knowing not why they ever did so.
A miserable thing can it be -
unconscious of why thy Creator made thee. — James 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

Time is invention and nothing else. — Henri Bergson

To exist is to change, to change is to mature, to mature is to go on creating oneself endlessly. — 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

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

French philosopher whom professional philosophers generally accord highest honors is Descartes. Montaigne and Pascal, Voltaire and Rousseau, Bergson and Sartre do not enjoy their greatest vogue among philosophers, and of these only Rousseau has had any considerable influence on the history of philosophy (through Kant and Hegel). — Friedrich Nietzsche

ACT as men of thought; THINK as men of action. — 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

There is no greater joy than that of feeling oneself a creator. The triumph of life is expressed by creation. — Henri Bergson

All that we have felt, thought and willed from our earliest infancy is there, leaning over the present which is about to join it, pressing against the portals of consciousness that would fain leave it outside. — Henri Bergson

Long before being artists, we are artisans; and all fabrication, however rudimentary, lives on likeness and repetition, like the natural geometry which serves as its fulcrum. Fabrication works on models which it sets out to reproduce; and even when it invents, it proceeds, or imagines itself to proceed, by a new arrangement of elements already known. Its principle is that "we must have like to produce like." In short, the strict application of the principle of finality, like that of the principle of mechanical causality, leads to the conclusion that "all is given." Both principles say the same thing in their respective languages, because they respond to the same need. — 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

Only those ideas that are least truly ours can be adequately expressed in words. — Henri Bergson

Creation signifies, above all, emotion, and that not in literature or art alone. We all know the concentration and effort implied in scientific discovery. Genius has been defined as an infinite capacity for taking pains. — Henri Bergson

The pure present is an ungraspable advance of the past devouring the future. In truth, all sensation is already memory. — Henri Bergson

That diversion of life towards mechanism is the real cause of laughter — Henri Bergson

We shall not dwell for the present on the effort to delve down to the depths of our being. If possible at all, it is exceptional: and it is on the surface, at the point where it inserts itself into the close-woven tissue of other exteriorised personalities, that our ego generally finds its point of attachment; its solidity lies in this solidarity. — Henri Bergson

It is emotion that drives the intelligence forward in spite of obstacles. — Henri Bergson

Homo sapiens, the only creature endowed with reason, is also the only creature to pin its existence on things unreasonable. — 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

What philosophy has lacked most of all is precision. — Henri Bergson

We are free when our actions emanate from our total personality, when they express it, when they resemble it in the indefinable way a work of art sometimes does the artist. — 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

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

I believe I experience creativity at every moment of my life. — Henri Bergson

In reality, the past is preserved by itself automatically. — Henri Bergson

There are manifold tones of mental life, or, in other words, our psychic life may be lived at different heights, now nearer to action, now further removed from it, according to the degree of our attention to life. — Henri Bergson

Thought creates things by slicing up reality into small bits that it can easily grasp. Thus when you are think-ing you are thing-ing. Thought does not report things, it distorts reality to create things, and as Bergson noted, "In so doing it allows what is the very essence of the real to escape." Thus to the extent we actually imagine a world of discrete and separate things, conceptions have become perceptions, and we have in this manner populated our universe with nothing but ghosts. — D.T. Suzuki

Instinct perfected is a faculty of using and even constructing organized instruments; intelligence perfected is the faculty of making and using unorganized instruments. — Henri Bergson

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

Sex-appeal is the keynote of our whole civilization. — Henri Bergson

Divine love is not something belonging to God: it is God Himself. — Henri Bergson

I believe that the time given to refutation in philosophy is usually time lost. Of the many attacks directed by many thinkers against each other, what now remains? Nothing, or assuredly very little. That which counts and endures is the modicum of positive truth which each contributes. The true statement is, of itself, able to displace the erroneous idea, and becomes, without our having taken the trouble of refuting anyone, the best of refutations. — Henri Bergson

The universe is a machine for the making of Gods. — Henri Bergson

The emotion felt by a man in the presence of nature certainly counts for something in the origin of religions. — Henri Bergson

The question is precisely to know whether the past has ceased to exist, or ceased to be useful ... — Henri Bergson

You will obtain a vision of matter that is perhaps fatiguing for your imagination, but pure and stripped of what the requirements of life make you add to it in external perception. — Henri Bergson

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

Actually, observed Lucette, wiping the long envelope which a drop of soda had stained,- Bergson is only for very young people or very unhappy people, such as this available rousse. — Vladimir Nabokov

Art has no other object than to set aside the symbols of practical utility, the generalities that are conventionally and socially accepted, everything in fact which masks reality from us, in order to set us face to face with reality itself. — Henri Bergson

Henri Bergson thought the principal function of the brain was to filter out most of reality so that we could focus on the tasks of earthly life," he said. "When the filter is weakened by a powerful drug, what we see is not delusion but the truth. — William Peter Blatty

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

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

Genius is that which forces the inertia of humanity to learn. — Henri Bergson

Between the ages of ten and fifteen in St. Petersburg, I must have read more fiction and poetry - English, Russian and French - than in any other five-year period of my life. I relished especially the works of Wells, Poe, Browning, Keats, Flaubert, Verlaine, Rimbaud, Chekhov, Tolstoy, and Alexander Blok. On another level, my heroes were the Scarlet Pimpernel, Phileas Fogg, and Sherlock Holmes. In other words, I was a perfectly normal trilingual child in a family with a large library. At a later period, in Western Europe, between the ages of 20 and 40, my favorites were Housman, Rupert Brooke, Norman Douglas, Bergson, Joyce, Proust, and Pushkin. Of these top favorites, several - Poe, Jules Verne, Emmuska Orezy, Conan Doyle, and Rupert Brooke - have lost the glamour and thrill they held for me. The others remain intact and by now are probably beyond change as far as I am concerned. — Vladimir Nabokov

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

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 seems that laughter needs an echo. — 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 is the responsibility, then, for deciding if they want merely to live,
or intend to make just the extra effort required
for fulfilling, even on this refractory planet,
the essential function of the universe,
which is a machine for the making of gods. — Henri Bergson

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

Praise God (or whatever it is) from (if direction exists) whom (if personality exists) all blessings (if that word corresponds to any percept of objective reality) flow (if Heraclitus and Bergson and Einstein are correct in stating that everything is more or less flowing about). — Dorothy L. Sayers

Psychical life is neither unity nor multiplicity, that it transcends both the mechanical and the intellectual, mechanism and finalism having meaning only where there is "distinct multiplicity," "spatiality," and consequently assemblage of pre-existing parts: "real duration" signifies both undivided continuity and creation. — 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

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

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

To drive out the darkness, bring in the light. — Henri Bergson

The only cure for vanity is laughter, and the only fault that is laughable is vanity. — Henri Bergson

[Duration is] the form which the succession of our conscious states assumes when our ego lets itself live, when it refrains from separating its present state from its former state. — Henri Bergson

Truth, as Bergson knew, is a hard apple, whether one is throwing it or catching it. — Donald Barthelme

We regard intelligence as man's main characteristic and we know that there is no superiority which intelligence cannot confer on us, no inferiority for which it cannot compensate. — 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

Fortunately, some are born with spiritual immune systems that sooner or later give rejection to the illusory worldview grafted upon them from birth through social conditioning. They begin sensing that something is amiss, and start looking for answers. Inner knowledge and anomalous outer experiences show them a side of reality others are oblivious to, and so begins their journey of awakening. Each step of the journey is made by following the heart instead of following the crowd and by choosing knowledge over the veils of ignorance. — Henri Bergson

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

Laughter is the corrective force which prevents us from becoming cranks. — Henri Bergson

This is positively not an album to play while you do a doctorate thesis on "Bergson, Webern and Charles the Vicious, Paradox or Ambiguity?" — Bob Brookmeyer

O my Bergson, you are a magician, and your book is a marvel, a real wonder in the history of philosophy ... In finishing it I found ... such a flavor of persistent euphony, as of a rich river that never foamed or ran thin, but steadily and firmly proceeded with its banks full to the brim. — William James

The motive power of democracy is love. — Henri Bergson

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

If reality impacted directly on our senses and our consciousness, if we could have direct communication between the material world and ourselves, art would be unnecessary. — Henri Bergson

But, then, I cannot escape the objection that there is no state of mind, however simple, which does not change every moment, since there is no consciousness without memory, and no continuation of a state without the addition, to the present feeling, of the memory of past moments. It is this which constitutes duration. Inner duration is the continuous life of a memory which prolongs the past into the present, the present either containing within it in a distinct form the ceaselessly growing image of the past, or, more profoundly, showing by its continual change of quality the heavier and still heavier load we drag behind us as we grow older. Without this survival of the past into the present there would be no duration, but only instantaneity. — Henri Bergson

There is nothing [that] disarms us like laughter. — 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

No two moments are identical in a conscious being — Henri Bergson

One can always reason with reason. — Henri Bergson

Darwin's theory of evolution pointed to the conclusion that flux (or becoming), not being, is the essence of reality. Though — Henri Bergson

There is nothing in philosophy which could not be said in everyday language. — Henri Bergson

Some other faculty than the intellect is necessary for the apprehension of reality. — 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

An absolute can only be given in an intuition, while all the rest has to do with analysis. — Henri Bergson

Intelligence is characterized by a natural incomprehension of life. — Henri Bergson

As you know, Bergson pointed out that there is no such thing as disorder but rather two sorts of order, geometric and living. — Jean Piaget

Reflecting on my experience, I find myself agreeing with the eminent Cambridge philosopher, Dr C. D. Broad, 'that we should do well to consider much more seriously than we have hitherto been inclined to do the type of theory which Bergson put forward in connection with memory and sense perception. The suggestion is that the function of the brain and nervous system and sense organs is in the main eliminative and not productive. Each person is at each moment capable of remembering all that has ever happened to him and of perceiving everything that is happening everywhere in the universe. The function of the brain and nervous system is to protect us from being overwhelmed and confused by this mass of largely useless and irrelevant knowledge, by shutting out most of what we should otherwise perceive or remember at any moment, and leaving only that very small and special selection which is likely to be practically useful.' According — Aldous Huxley

Here I would point out, as a symptom equally worthy of notice, the ABSENCE OF FEELING which usually accompanies laughter. It seems as though the comic could not produce its disturbing effect unless it fell, so to say, on the surface of a soul that is thoroughly calm and unruffled. Indifference is its natural environment, for laughter has no greater foe than emotion. I do not mean that we could not laugh at a person who inspires us with pity, for instance, or even with affection, but in such a case we must, for the moment, put our affection out of court and impose silence upon our pity. In a society composed of pure intelligences there would probably be no more tears, though perhaps there would still be laughter; whereas highly emotional souls, in tune and unison with life, in whom every event would be sentimentally prolonged and re-echoed, would neither know nor understand laughter. — Henri Bergson

A situation is always comic if it participates simultaneously in two series of events which are absolutely independent of each other, and if it can be interpreted in two quite different meanings. — Henri Bergson

THE INTENTION OF LIFE IS NOT TO REMAIN, BUT TO EVOLVE TO SOMETHING BETTER THAN IT WAS BEFORE AT EVERY STAGE, AND FINALLY, TO SOMETHING WONDERFUL. — James Bergson

It is the very essence of intelligence to coordinate means with a view to a remote end, and to undertake what it does not feel absolutely sure of carrying out. — Henri Bergson

Sex appeal is the keynote of our civilization. — Henri Bergson

The world that our senses and our consciousness habitually acquaint us with is now nothing more than the shadow of itself; and it is cold like death. — Henri Bergson

Our laughter is always the laughter of a group. — Henri Bergson