Quotes About Bergson

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

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?

These two sentences suffice to show, as I shall try to prove, that Bergson does not know what number is, and has himself no clear idea of it.

But since the time of Leibnitz, it is hard to find philosophers who stress relatedness in any way. There is Henri Bergson, and before him the romantics, and Marx with his talk of the brotherhood of revolution, and Martin Buber with his I and Thou, but by and large modern philosophy is about aloneness. We are forlorn, abandoned.

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

What if the eternities are open? What if there is no set eternity to which we are heading? No teleology, as Bergson argued, to which life must aim. What if new emergences occur on the grandest scale of all and God Himself is participating in a dynamic and open existence?

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.

Henri Bergson writes that humor is godless and entirely human since humor runs counter to the sublime: instead of transcending, you are made acutely aware of the skin in which you exist.

Actually, observed Lucette, wiping the long envelope which a drop of soda had stained,- Bergson is only for very young people or very unhappy people, such as this available rousse.

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

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

One summer day, Eugenio Scalfari and I created an entire philosophical system: the philosophy of the élan vital . The next day we discovered that it had already been invented by Bergson.

Truth, as Bergson knew, is a hard apple, whether one is throwing it or catching it.

The motive power of democracy is love

We can elaborate a valid concept of Nature only if we find something at the jointure of Being and Nothingness. Despite what Bergson says, there is a kinship between the concept of Nature and radical contingency. In order to elaborate this concept, we have to leave positivism or negativism, which maintains a separation between the objective and the subjective, and which thus makes impossible the subjective-objective that Nature will always be.

Education is thus constantly remade in the praxis. In order to be it must become. Its "duration" (in the Bergsonian meaning of the word) is found in the interplay of opposites permanence and change.