Quotes from Henri Bergson

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

... divine love is not something belonging to God: it is God Himself.

Intelligence is the faculty of making artificial objects, especially tools to make tools.

No two moments are identical in a conscious being

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

A situation is always comic if it participates simultaneously in two series of events which are absolutely independent of each other, and if it can be interpreted in two quite different meanings.

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

The pure present is an ungraspable advance of the past devouring the future. In truth, all sensation is already memory.

To exist is to change, to change is to mature, to mature is to go on creating oneself endlessly.

Think like a man of action, act like a man of thought.

The idea of the future, pregnant with an infinity of possibilities, is thus more fruitful than the future itself, and this is why we find more charm in hope than in possession, in dreams than in reality.

The universe is a machine for the making of Gods.

Time is invention and nothing else.

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

Europe is overpopulated, the world will soon be in the same condition, and if the self-reproduction of man is not rationalized... we shall have war.

Men do not sufficiently realize that their future is in their own hands. Theirs is the task of determining first of all whether they want to go on living or not. Theirs is the responsibility, then, for deciding if they want merely to live, or intend to make just the extra effort required for fulfilling, even on this refractory planet, the essential function of the universe, which is a machine for the making of gods.

Creation signifies, above all, emotion, and that not in literature or art alone. We all know the concentration and effort implied in scientific discovery. Genius has been defined as an infinite capacity for taking pains.

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.

The Eyes See Only What The Mind Is Prepared To Comprehend.

A situation is always comic if it participates simultaneously in two series of events which are absolutely independent of each other, and if it can be interpreted in two quite different meanings.

When it is said that an object occupies a large space in the soul or even that it fills it entirely, we ought to understand by this simply that its image has altered the shade of a thousand perceptions or memories, and that in this sense it pervades them, although it does not itself come into view.

Pour un être conscient, exister consiste à changer, changer à se mûrir, se mûrir à se créer indéfiniment soi-même.

Disorder is simply the order we are not looking for.

The question is precisely to know whether the past has ceased to exist, or ceased to be useful...