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 BergsonRead
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.
Interpretation
Our past shapes our desires and actions, making every experience unique and irreversible.
This quote by Henri Bergson highlights the idea that our consciousness and experiences are deeply influenced by our past. Each moment we encounter is not just a repetition of the previous ones; instead, we are constantly evolving and changing due to our memories and experiences. This irreversibility suggests that while situations may appear similar, they can never be the same for us, as we bring our accumulated past into every new experience.
In practice
During a speech on personal growth, one might use the quote to illustrate how experiences shape who we become.
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.
What kind of world would we create if three times a day we activated our compassion and reason as we sat down to eat, if we had the moral imagination and the pragmatic will to change our most fundamental act of consumption?
The Secretary-General must be a determined advocate for the values of tolerance and solidarity - universal values that are shared by cultures and religions around the globe.
The mountebank told them that God was surely trying to kill them, possibly because He was through with them, and that they should have the good manners to die. This, as you can see, they did.
Nirvana means to extinguish the burning fires of the Three Poisons: greed, anger, and ignorance. This can be accomplished by letting go of dissatisfaction.
The communism of combined wealth and capital, the outgrown of overweening cupidity and selfishness which assiduously undermines the justice and integrity of free institutions, is not less dangerous than the communism of oppressed poverty and toil which, exasperated by injustice and discontent, attacks with wide disorder the citadel of misrule.
I discovered that the study of past philosophers is of little use unless our own reality enters into it. Our reality alone allows the thinker's questions to become comprehensible.
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