Words matter. These are the best Henri Bergson Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
To perceive means to immobilize… we seize, in the act of perception, something which outruns perception itself.
There is no greater joy than that of feeling oneself a creator. The triumph of life is expressed by creation.
The present contains nothing more than the past, and what is found in the effect was already in the cause.
And I also see how this body influences external images: it gives back movement to them.
It seems that laughter needs an echo.
Some other faculty than the intellect is necessary for the apprehension of reality.
The major task of the twentieth century will be to explore the unconscious, to investigate the subsoil of the mind.
Homo sapiens, the only creature endowed with reason, is also the only creature to pin its existence on things unreasonable.
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.
There is nothing in philosophy which could not be said in everyday language.
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.
Think like a man of action, act like a man of thought.
In laughter we always find an unavowed intention to humiliate and consequently to correct our neighbour.
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.
I see plainly how external images influence the image that I call my body: they transmit movement to it.
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.
Genius is that which forces the inertia of humanity to learn.
For 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.
I cannot escape the objection that there is no state of mind, however simple, that does not change every moment.
Sex appeal is the keynote of our civilization.
