Quotes from bergson henri ii

The metaphor never goes very far, anymore than a curve can long be confused with its tangent.

At the root of the comic there is a sort of rigidity which compels its victims to keep strictly to one path, to follow it straight along, to shut their ears and refuse to listen.

Realism is in the work when idealism is in the soul, and it is only through idealism that we resume contact with reality.

Only those ideas which least belong to us can be adequately expressed in words.

Comic absurdity is of the same nature as that of dreams.

Evolution does not mark out a solitary route ... it takes directions without aiming at ends ... it remains inventive even in its adaptations.

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

The major task of the twentieth century will be to explore the unconscious, to investigate the subsoil of the mind.

The universe is simmering down, like a giant stew left to cook for four billion years. Sooner or later we won't be able to tell the carrots from the onions.

There is, between our body and other bodies, an arrangement like that of the pieces of glass that compose a kaleidoscopic picture. Our activity goes from an arrangement to a re-arrangement, each time no doubt giving the kaleidoscope a new shake, but not interesting itself in the shake, and seeing only the new picture. Our knowledge of the operation of nature must be exactly symmetrical, therefore, with the interest we take in our own operation.

The open society is one that is deemed in principle to embrace all humanity.

The sole function of philosophy is to lead us to happiness by way of the shortest possible route.

But if metaphysics is to proceed by intuition, if intuition has the mobility of duration as its object, and if duration is of a psychical nature, shall we not be confining the philosopher to the exclusive contemplation of himself?

Instead of attaching ourselves to the inner becoming of things, we place ourselves outside them in order to recompose their becoming artificially. We take snapshots, as it were, of the passing reality, and, as these are characteristic of the reality, we have only to string them on a becoming abstract, uniform and invisible, situated at the back of the apparatus of knowledge, in order to imitate what there is that is characteristic in this becoming itself.

Life is like a current passing from germ to germ through the medium of a developed organism.

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.

Wherever anything lives, there is, open somewhere, a register in which time is being inscribed.