Henri Bergson Quotes - Page 2

I believe I experience creativity at every moment of my life.

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

To ease another's burden, help to carry it.

One can always reason with reason.

The emotion felt by a man in the presence of nature certainly counts for something in the origin of religions.

Realism is in the work when idealism is in the soul, and it is only through idealism that we resume contact with reality.

Sex-appeal is the keynote of our whole civilization.

Religion is to mysticism what popularization is to science

In reality, the past is preserved by itself automatically.

The motive power of democracy is love

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.

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

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

An absolute can only be given in an intuition, while all the rest has to do with analysis. We call intuition here the sympathy by which one is transported into the interior of an object in order to coincide with what there is unique andconsequently inexpressible in it. Analysis, on the contrary, is the operation which reduces the object to elements already known.

The major task of the twentieth century will be to explore the unconscious, to investigate the subsoil of the mind.

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.

Only those ideas that are least truly ours can be adequately expressed in words.

It is with our entire past ... that we desire, will and act ... from this survival of the past it follows that consciousness cannot go through the same state twice. The circumstances may still be the same, but they will act no longer on the same person ... that is why our duration is irreversible.

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

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?

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.

All the living hold together, and all yield to the same tremendous push. The animal takes its stand on the plant, man bestrides animality, and the whole of humanity, in space and in time, is one immense army galloping beside and before and behind each of us in an overwhelming charge able to beat down every resistance and clear the most formidable obstacles, perhaps even death.

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.

There are manifold tones of mental life, or, in other words, our psychic life may be lived at different heights, now nearer to action, now further removed from it, according to the degree of our attention to life.

I believe that the time given to refutation in philosophy is usually time lost. Of the many attacks directed by many thinkers against each other, what now remains? Nothing, or assuredly very little. That which counts and endures is the modicum of positive truth which each contributes. The true statement is, of itself, able to displace the erroneous idea, and becomes, without our having taken the trouble of refuting anyone, the best of refutations.