Henri Bergson

Find the best quotes, maxims and aphorisms of Henri Bergson

Biography : French philosopher.
Born: 1859 - Died: 1941
Period:
20th century
19th century
Place of birth: France
France

France

Henri Bergson - Quotes

Think like a man of action, act like a man of thought.
Henri Bergson /

To exist is to change, to change is to mature, to mature is to go on creating oneself endlessly.
Henri Bergson - Creative Evolution /

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

To choose, and therefore exclude.
Henri Bergson /

to choose

All our analyses show us, in life, an effort to remount the incline that matter descends.
Henri Bergson - Creative Evolution /

To act freely is to retake possession of oneself; it is to place oneself back in pure duration.
Henri Bergson - Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness /

Consciousness is a link between what was and what will be; a bridge between the past and the future.
Henri Bergson - L’Énergie spirituelle /

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

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 - Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness /

The art of the writer consists above all in making us forget that he uses words.
Henri Bergson - L’Énergie spirituelle /

Art aims at impressing feelings on us rather than expressing them;
Henri Bergson - Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness /

Men depend on fame and honor to the exact extent that they are not sure of having succeeded.
Henri Bergson - L’Énergie spirituelle /

Analysis operates on immobility, while intuition is located in mobility or, what amounts to the same thing, in duration. That is the very clear line of demarcation between intuition and analysis.
Henri Bergson - La Pensée et le Mouvant /

intuition

Sincerity is contagious.
Henri Bergson /

sincerity

What happens when one of our actions ceases to be spontaneous and becomes automatic ? Consciousness departs from it.
Henri Bergson - L’Énergie spirituelle /

Every action is an encroachment on the future.
Henri Bergson - L’Énergie spirituelle /

Joy always announces that life has succeeded, gained ground, conquered. All great joy has a triumphant note.
Henri Bergson - L’Énergie spirituelle /

In short, intelligence, considered in what seems to be its original feature, is the faculty of manufacturing artificial objects, especially tools for making tools, and of indefinitely varying the manufacture.
Henri Bergson /

intelligence

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

change

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 /

intelligence

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 /

art

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

science

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 /

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 /

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 /