Henri Bergson Quotes
-
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.
→ -
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.
→ -
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.
→ -
The only cure for vanity is laughter. And the only fault that's laughable is vanity.
→ -
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.
→ -
Wherever anything lives, there is, open somewhere, a register in which time is being inscribed.
→ -
Some other faculty than the intellect is necessary for the apprehension of reality.
→ -
Life does not proceed by the association and addition of elements, but by dissociation and division.
→ -
One can always reason with reason.
→ -
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.
→ -
Fortunately, some are born with spiritual immune systems that sooner or later give rejection to the illusory worldview grafted upon then 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 the journey of awakening. Each step of the journey is made by following the heart instead of the crowd, and by choosing knowledge over veils of ignorance.
→ -
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.
→ -
Knowledge, in so far as it is directed to practical matters, has only to enumerate the principal possible attitudes of the thing towards us, as well as our best possible attitude towards it. Therein lies the ordinary function of ready-made concepts, those stations with which we mark out the path of becoming. But to seek to penetrate with them into the inmost nature of things, is to apply to the mobility of the real a method created in order to give stationary points of observation on it.
→ -
ACT as men of thought; THINK as men of action.
→ -
The universe... is a machine for the making of gods.
→ -
There is nothing [that] disarms us like laughter.
→ -
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.
→ -
Religion is to mysticism what popularization is to science
→ -
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 varying the manufacture.
→ -
Only those ideas that are least truly ours can be adequately expressed in words.
→ -
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.
→ -
An absolute can only be given in an intuition, while all the rest has to do with analysis. We call intuition here the sympathy by which one is transported into the interior of an object in order to coincide with what there is unique andconsequently inexpressible in it. Analysis, on the contrary, is the operation which reduces the object to elements already known.
→ -
The vital spirit. L'élan vital
→ -
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.
→ -
Realism is in the work when idealism is in the soul, and it is only through idealism that we resume contact with reality.
→ -
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.
→ -
To exist is to change, to change is to mature, to mature is to go on creating oneself endlessly.
→ -
The emotion felt by a man in the presence of nature certainly counts for something in the origin of religions.
→ -
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.
→ -
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.
→
Related Authors
-
Soren Kierkegaard Philosopher -
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel Philosopher -
Friedrich Nietzsche Philologist -
Wilhelm Dilthey Psychologist -
Sigmund Freud Neurologist -
Martin Heidegger Philosopher -
Immanuel Kant Philosopher -
Baruch Spinoza Philosopher -
Jean-Paul Sartre Philosopher -
Maurice Merleau-Ponty Philosopher -
Gottfried Leibniz Mathematician -
Rene Descartes Philosopher -
Alfred North Whitehead Mathematician -
Arthur Schopenhauer Philosopher -
Gaston Bachelard Philosopher -
Plato Philosopher -
Edmund Husserl Philosopher -
Marcel Proust Novelist -
William James Philosopher -
Gilles Deleuze Philosopher