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
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?
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote highlights the elusive nature of knowledge and understanding, much like trying to catch smoke, which slips away from us.
Henri Bergson uses the metaphor of children trying to catch smoke to illustrate the difficulty philosophers face in grasping the complexities of existence and reality. Just as children cannot hold onto smoke, philosophers often find that the concepts and truths they seek remain just out of reach, suggesting the limitations of human understanding and the abstract nature of philosophical inquiry.
Themes
PhilosophyKnowledgeUnderstandingIllusionTruth
In practice
Example use cases
In a discussion about the nature of reality, this quote can emphasize the challenges of philosophical inquiry.
More from Henri Bergson
All quotes βTo exist is to change, to change is to mature, to mature is to go on creating oneself endlessly.
Henri BergsonRead
Laughter is the corrective force which prevents us from becoming cranks.
Henri BergsonRead
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.
Henri BergsonRead
Religion is to mysticism what popularization is to science
Henri BergsonRead
And I also see how this body influences external images: it gives back movement to them.
Henri BergsonRead
Similar quotes
The determination of the average man is not merely a matter of speculative curiosity; it may be of the most important service to the science of man and the social system. It ought necessarily to precede every other inquiry into social physics, since it is, as it were, the basis. The average man, indeed, is in a nation what the centre of gravity is in a body; it is by having that central point in view that we arrive at the apprehension of all the phenomena of equilibrium and motion.
Adolphe QueteletRead
If one sticks too rigidly to one's principles, one would hardly see anybody.
Agatha ChristieRead
If you describe things as better than they are, you are considered to be a romantic; if you describe things as worse than they are, you will be called a realist; and if you describe things exactly as they are, you will be thought of as a satirist.
Quentin CrispRead
Ahimsa is the highest duty. Even if we cannot practice it in full, we must try to understand its spirit and refrain as far as is humanly possible from violence.
Mahatma GandhiRead
You run and you run to catch up to the sun but it's sinking, racing around to come up behind you again.
Roger WatersRead
It seems to me that all the things we keep in sealed boxes are both alive and dead until we open the box, that the unobserved is both there and not.
John GreenRead