Quotes from Henri Bergson

the human mind is so constructed that it cannot begin to understand the new until it has done everything in its power to relate it to the old.

No two moments are identical in a conscious being

Duration is] the form which the succession of our conscious states assumes when our ego lets itself live, when it refrains from separating its present state from its former state.

What philosophy has lacked most of all is precision.

That diversion of life towards mechanism is the real cause of laughter

The world that our senses and our consciousness habitually acquaint us with is now nothing more than the shadow of itself; and it is cold like death.

We seize, in the act of perception, something which outruns perception itself.

Art has no other object than to set aside the symbols of practical utility, the generalities that are conventionally and socially accepted, everything in fact which masks reality from us, in order to set us face to face with reality itself.

Some other faculty than the intellect is necessary for the apprehension of reality.

Intelligence is characterized by a natural incomprehension of life.

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.

And I also see how this body influences external images: it gives back movement to them.

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

ACT as men of thought; THINK as men of action.

In laughter we always find an unavowed intention to humiliate and consequently to correct our neighbour.

In just the same way the thousands of successive positions of a runner are contracted into one sole symbolic attitude, which our eye perceives, which art reproduces, and which becomes for everyone the image of a man who runs.

Homo sapiens, the only creature endowed with reason, is also the only creature to pin its existence on things unreasonable.

We are free when our actions emanate from our total personality, when they express it, when they resemble it in the indefinable way a work of art sometimes does the artist.

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

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

The only cure for vanity is laughter, and the only fault that is laughable is vanity.

Sex appeal is the keynote of our civilization.

To perceive means to immobilize ... we seize, in the act of perception, something which outruns perception itself.

All the living hold together, and all yield to the same tremendous push. The animal takes its stand on the plant, man bestrides animality, and the whole of humanity, in space and in time, is one immense army galloping beside and before and behind each of us in an overwhelming charge able to beat down every resistance and clear the most formidable obstacles, perhaps even death.