Henri Bergson's Quotes

Our laughter is always the laughter of a group.

There is no greater joy than that of feeling oneself a creator. The triumph of life is expressed by creation.

Wherever anything lives, there is, open somewhere, a register in which time is being inscribed.

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.

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.

In its entirety, probably, it follows us at every instant; all that we have felt, thought and willed from our earliest infancy is there, leaning over the present which is about to join it, pressing against the portals of consciousness that would fain leave it outside.

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.

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.

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.

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

Homo sapiens, the only creature endowed with reason, is also the only creature to pin its existence on things unreasonable.

The present contains nothing more than the past, and what is found in the effect was already in the cause.

Think like a man of action, act like a man of thought.

To perceive means to immobilize... we seize, in the act of perception, something which outruns perception itself.

It seems that laughter needs an echo.

An absolute can only be given in an intuition, while all the rest has to do with analysis.

And I also see how this body influences external images: it gives back movement to them.

Some other faculty than the intellect is necessary for the apprehension of reality.

Instinct perfected is a faculty of using and even constructing organized instruments; intelligence perfected is the faculty of making and using unorganized instruments.

Genius is that which forces the inertia of humanity to learn.

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

The only cure for vanity is laughter, and the only fault that is laughable is vanity.

In reality, the past is preserved by itself automatically.