Henri Bergson Quotes

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

I believe I experience creativity at every moment of my life.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That diversion of life towards mechanism is the real cause of laughter

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.

Religion is to mysticism what popularization is to science.

What philosophy has lacked most of all is precision.

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

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

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

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

In reality, the past is preserved by itself automatically.

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

Time is invention and nothing else.

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

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

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

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

The motive power of democracy is love.

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

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

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

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

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

There is nothing [that] disarms us like laughter.

Our laughter is always the laughter of a group.

To drive out the darkness, bring in the light.

No two moments are identical in a conscious being

Realism is in the work when idealism is in the soul, and it is only through idealism that we resume contact with reality.

Sex-appeal is the keynote of our whole civilization.

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.

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

One can always reason with reason.

Sex appeal is the keynote of our civilization.

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

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

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

Intelligence is characterized by a natural incomprehension of life.

It seems that laughter needs an echo.

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

The universe is a machine for the making of Gods.

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