The present contains nothing more than the past, and what is found in the effect was already in the cause.
HENRI BERGSONIn reality, the past is preserved by itself automatically.
More Henri Bergson Quotes
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Is 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 BERGSON -
Intelligence is characterized by a natural incomprehension of life.
HENRI BERGSON -
Intuition is a method of feeling one’s way intellectually into the inner heart of a thing to locate what is unique and inexpressible in it.
HENRI BERGSON -
However spontaneous it seems, laughter always implies a kind of secret freemasonry, or even complicity, with other laughers, real or imaginary.
HENRI BERGSON -
Action on the move creates its own route, creates to a very great extent the conditions under which it is to be fulfilled and thus baffles all calculation.
HENRI BERGSON -
I cannot escape the objection that there is no state of mind, however simple, that does not change every moment.
HENRI BERGSON -
In laughter we always find an unavowed intention to humiliate and consequently to correct our neighbour.
HENRI BERGSON -
Homo sapiens, the only creature endowed with reason, is also the only creature to pin its existence on things unreasonable.
HENRI BERGSON -
To perceive means to immobilize. To say this is to say that we seize, in the act of perception, something which outruns perception itself.
HENRI BERGSON -
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.
HENRI BERGSON -
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.
HENRI BERGSON -
There is no greater joy than that of feeling oneself a creator. The triumph of life is expressed by creation.
HENRI BERGSON -
When we make the cerebral state the beginning of an action, and in no sense the condition of a perception, we place the perceived images of things outside the image of our body, and thus replace perception within the things themselves.
HENRI BERGSON -
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.
HENRI BERGSON -
Divine love is not something belonging to God: it is God Himself.
HENRI BERGSON -
The emotion felt by a man in the presence of nature certainly counts for something in the origin of religions.
HENRI BERGSON -
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.
HENRI BERGSON -
To drive out the darkness, bring in the light.
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 -
Only those ideas that are least truly ours can be adequately expressed in words.
HENRI BERGSON -
I believe I experience creativity at every moment of my life.
HENRI BERGSON -
Sex-appeal is the keynote of our whole civilization.
HENRI BERGSON -
Genius is that which forces the inertia of humanity to learn.
HENRI BERGSON -
Religion is to mysticism what popularization is to science.
HENRI BERGSON -
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 -
There is nothing in philosophy which could not be said in everyday language.
HENRI BERGSON