Henri Bergson quotes - page 2

Henri Bergson was a French philosopher known for his influential ideas on time, consciousness, and creativity. His work challenged mechanistic views of reality and emphasized the importance of intuition and subjective experience. He became a prominent figure in both philosophy and literature, receiving the Nobel Prize in Literature. Here are 49 of his quotes:

It seems that laughter needs an echo.

Henri Bergson

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.

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

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.

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

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

Henri Bergson

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

Henri Bergson

In laughter we always find an unavowed intention to humiliate and consequently to correct our neighbour.

Henri Bergson

Our laughter is always the laughter of a group.

Henri Bergson

The eyes see only what the mind is prepared to comprehend.

Henri Bergson

The pure present is an ungraspable advance of the past devouring the future. In truth, all sensation is already memory.

Henri Bergson

The open society is one that is deemed in principle to embrace all humanity.

Henri Bergson

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

Henri Bergson

A philosopher worthy of the name has never said more than a single thing: and even then it is something he has tried to say, rather than actually said. And he has said only one thing because he has seen only one point: and at that it was not so much a vision as a contact...

Henri Bergson

I see plainly how external images influence the image that I call my body: they transmit movement to it.

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

In short, intelligence, considered in what seems to be its original feature, is the faculty of manufacturing artificial objects, especially tools to make tools, and of indefinitely urging the manufacture.

Henri Bergson

His intelligence and his imagination will use the teachings of the theologians to express in words what he experiences, and in material images what he sees spiritually.

Henri Bergson

This explains the primary mission which he feels to be entrusted to him, that of an intensifier of religious faith.

Henri Bergson

Intelligence is the faculty of making artificial objects, especially tools to make tools.

Henri Bergson

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.

Henri Bergson