Henri Bergson Quotes

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Henri Bergson

Profession : Philosopher

Birth : October 18, 1859

Religion is to mysticism what popularization is to science.

Henri Bergson

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

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

Henri Bergson

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

Henri Bergson

Life does not proceed by the association and addition of elements, but by dissociation and division.

Henri Bergson

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

Henri Bergson

The motive power of democracy is love.

Henri Bergson

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

Henri Bergson

It seems that laughter needs an echo.

Henri Bergson

There is nothing in philosophy which could not be said in everyday language.

Henri Bergson

Sex appeal is the keynote of our civilization.

Henri Bergson

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

Henri Bergson

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

Henri Bergson

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

Henri Bergson

Our laughter is always the laughter of a group.

Henri Bergson

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

Henri Bergson

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

Henri Bergson

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

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

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