Explore Quotes by Henri Bergson

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.

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

Sex-appeal is the keynote of our whole civilization.

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

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.

Religion is to mysticism what popularization is to science

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

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

In reality, the past is preserved by itself automatically.

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.

The motive power of democracy is love

It seems that laughter needs an echo.

The only cure for vanity is laughter. And the only fault that's laughable is vanity.

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

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

Intelligence is characterized by a natural incomprehension of life.

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.

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

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.

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.

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