Henri Bergson Quotes

68 quotes in 912 categories

• To exist is to change, to change is to mature, to mature is to go on creating oneself endlessly.
• Homo sapiens, the only creature endowed with reason, is also the only creature to pin its existence on things unreasonable.
• Think like a man of action, act like a man of thought.
• Some other faculty than the intellect is necessary for the apprehension of reality.
• To perceive means to immobilize... we seize, in the act of perception, something which outruns perception itself.
• Instinct perfected is a faculty of using and even constructing organized instruments; intelligence perfected is the faculty of making and using unorganized instruments.
• And I also see how this body influences external images: it gives back movement to them.
• 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…
• In laughter we always find an unavowed intention to humiliate and consequently to correct our neighbour.
• The major task of the twentieth century will be to explore the unconscious, to investigate the subsoil of the mind.
• 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…
• 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…
• Intelligence is characterized by a natural incomprehension of life.
• There is no greater joy than that of feeling oneself a creator. The triumph of life is expressed by creation.
• An absolute can only be given in an intuition, while all the rest has to do with analysis.
• The only cure for vanity is laughter. And the only fault that's laughable is vanity.
• It seems that laughter needs an echo.
• Intelligence is the faculty of making artificial objects, especially tools to make tools.
• The motive power of democracy is love
• In reality, the past is preserved by itself automatically.

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