Quotes by Henri Bergson

About Henri Bergson:

Henri-Louis Bergson was a major French philosopher, influential especially in the first half of the 20th century. Bergson convinced many thinkers that the processes of immediate experience and intuition are more significant than abstract rationalism and science for understanding reality.
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Mūsų laisvė pačiais ją įtvirtinančiais veiksmais sukuria tolydžio stiprėjančius įpročius, kurie ją pasmaugia, jeigu jos neatnaujina nuolatinės pastangos: jos tyko automatizmas. Pati gyviausia mintis sustabarėja ją išreiškiančioje f...

Henri Bergson

In just the same way the thousands of successive positions of a runner are contracted into one sole symbolic attitude, which our eye perceives, which art reproduces, and which becomes for everyone the image of a man who runs.

Henri Bergson

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...

Henri Bergson

Europe is overpopulated, the world will soon be in the same condition, and if the self-reproduction of man is not rationalized... we shall have war.

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

[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

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

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

Henri Bergson

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

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

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

Henri Bergson

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

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

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

Henri Bergson

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

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

The motive power of democracy is love.

Henri Bergson

Think like a man of action, act like a man of thought.

Henri Bergson

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

Henri Bergson

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

Henri Bergson

Author Bio

  • NameHenri Bergson
  • Descriptionphilosopher from France
  • AliasesHenri-Louis Bergson
  • BornOctober 18, 1859
  • DiedJanuary 4, 1941
  • CountryFrance
  • ProfessionPhilosopher; Writer
  • AwardsNobel Prize In Literature; Officer Of The Legion Of Honour; Grand Cross Of The Legion Of Honour