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.

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

Laughter is the corrective force which prevents us from becoming cranks.

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.

Religion is to mysticism what popularization is to science

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

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.

All the translations of a poem in all possible languages may add nuance to nuance and, by a kind of mutual retouching, by correcting one another, may give an increasingly faithful picture of the poem they translate, yet they will never give the inner meaning of the original.

It seems that laughter needs an echo.

The motive power of democracy is love

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?

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

Intelligence is characterized by a natural incomprehension of life.

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

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

In reality, the past is preserved by itself automatically.

I would say act like a man of thought and think like a man of action.

The universe... is a machine for the making of gods.

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.

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

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 varying the manufacture.