The present contains nothing more than the past, and what is found in the effect was already in the cause.
HENRI BERGSONThe present contains nothing more than the past, and what is found in the effect was already in the cause.
HENRI BERGSONThe movement of the stream is distinct from the river bed, although it must adopt its winding course.
HENRI BERGSONDivine love is not something belonging to God: it is God Himself.
HENRI BERGSONIt 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.
HENRI BERGSONFor 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 BERGSONSex-appeal is the keynote of our whole civilization.
HENRI BERGSONIs it astonishing that, like children trying to catch smoke by closing their hands, philosophers so often see the object they would grasp fly before them?
HENRI BERGSONRealism is in the work when idealism is in the soul, and it is only through idealism that we resume contact with reality.
HENRI BERGSONWherever anything lives, there is, open somewhere, a register in which time is being inscribed.
HENRI BERGSONIf reality impacted directly on our senses and our consciousness, if we could have direct communication between the material world and ourselves, art would be unnecessary.
HENRI BERGSONI believe I experience creativity at every moment of my life.
HENRI BERGSONLaughter is, above all, a corrective. Being intended to humiliate, it must make a painful impression on the person against whom it is directed. By laughter, society avenges itself for the liberties taken with it. It would fail in its object if it bore the stamp of sympathy or kindness.
HENRI BERGSONIn 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 BERGSONHomo sapiens, the only creature endowed with reason, is also the only creature to pin its existence on things unreasonable.
HENRI BERGSONOnly those ideas that are least truly ours can be adequately expressed in words.
HENRI BERGSONI see plainly how external images influence the image that I call my body : they transmit movement to it.
HENRI BERGSON