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
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.
In practice
In a discussion about the nature of reality, this quote can emphasize the challenges of philosophical inquiry.
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.
Those to whom worshiping is a window, to open but also to shut, have not yet visited the house of their souls whose windows are open from dawn to dawn.
There is an element of truth in every idea that lasts long enough to be called corny.
Mind, I am not preaching anything contrary to accepted morality. I am not advocating free love in this or any other case. Society must go on, I suppose, and society can only exist if the normal, if the virtuous, and the slightly deceitful flourish, and if the passionate, the headstrong, and the too-truthful are condemned to suicide and madness.
It is labor that has made the world a fit habitation for the human race.
Hazard has conditioned us to live in hazard. All our pleasures are dependent on it. Even though I arrange for a pleasure, and look forward to it, my eventual enjoyment of it is still a matter of hazard. Wherever time passes, there is hazard.
…and there, in the background, the sky’s sediment had sunk to a place where all the woe of the words ‘I am’ dissolved into blue peace. He said it. ‘The ocean.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.