Henri Bergson was a famous French philosopher and mathematician.
He was born in Paris in 1859 and devoted his prime years to the study of mathematics. He succeeded in his primary mission and won the first prize in mathematics, at the prestigious Concours General.
In the latter half of his life, Henri Bergson started cultivating his knowledge of philosophy. He believed that intuition superseded abstract rationalism in understanding reality.
To explain his line of thought, he wrote many books like 'Matter And Memory' and 'The Two Sources Of Morality And Religion'. Here are some of the most famous Henri Bergson quotes on philosophy and spirituality to start your day with some food for thought.
Henri Bergson Quotes On Time
These quotes by Henri Bergson on the significance of ‘time’ will alter your perceptions.
“The pure present is an ungraspable advance of the past devouring the future. In truth, all sensation is already memory.” - 'Matter And Memory'.
“Time is invention and nothing else.”
“Intuition is a method of feeling one's way intellectually into the inner heart of a thing to locate what is unique and inexpressible in it.” - 'Flowers In The Desert'.
"The circumstances may still be the same, but they will act no longer on the same person … that is why our duration is irreversible."
"I believe I experience creativity at every moment of my life."
“It is emotion that drives the intelligence forward in spite of obstacles.”
“Creation signifies, above all, emotion, and that is 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.”
"Inner knowledge and anomalous outer experiences show them a side of reality others are oblivious to, and so begins their journey of awakening."
“Wherever anything lives, there is, open somewhere, a register in which time is being inscribed.”
“If reality impacted directly on our senses and our consciousness, if we could have direct communication between the material world and ourselves, art would be unnecessary.”
“The question is precisely to know whether the past has ceased to exist, or ceased to be useful...”
“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.” - 'Time And Free Will'.
“No two moments are identical in a conscious being”
“Men do not sufficiently realise that their future is in their own hands.” - 'The Two Sources Of Morality And Religion', 1932.
"A philosopher worthy of the name has never said more than a single thing: and even then it is something he has tried to say, rather than actually said."
"It is with our entire past … that we desire, will and act … from this survival of the past it follows that consciousness cannot go through the same state twice."
“[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.” - 'Time And Free Will'.
Henri Bergson Spiritual Quotes
(Henri Bergson was a notable French philosopher, who had interesting theories about the refractory planet.)
Henri Bergson's quotes and sayings about the spiritual world are relevant even today. Read on to know why.
“The present contains nothing more than the past, and what is found in the effect was already in the cause.” - 'Creative Evolution', 1907.
“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.”
“Realism is in the work when idealism is in the soul, and it is only through idealism that we resume contact with reality.”
“The universe is a machine for the making of Gods.”
- Henri Bergson in 'The White Bedouin' written by George Potter.
“Homo sapiens, the only creature endowed with reason, is also the only creature to pin its existence on things unreasonable.”
“To drive out the darkness, bring in the light.”
“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.”
“One can always reason with reason.”
"What makes hope such an intense pleasure is the fact that the future, which we dispose of to our liking, appears to us at the same time under a multitude of forms, equally attractive and equally possible."
“Genius is that which forces the inertia of humanity to learn.”
“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.” - 'Creative Evolution', 1907.
“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?”
“Free from all other considerations and ignoring any but intellectual values, the judges have deliberately taken their place in what the philosophers have called a community of the mind.” - Nobel Prize in literature accepting letter, 1927.
“This explains the primary mission which he feels to be entrusted to him, that of an intensifier of religious faith.” - 'The Two Sources Of Morality And Religion Source'.
“Religion is to mysticism what popularization is to science”
"Intelligence starts ordinarily from the immobile, and reconstructs movement as best it can with immobilities in juxtaposition."
“To ease another’s burden, help to carry 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.”
“Disorder is simply the order we are not looking for.” - 'The Creative Mind: An Introduction To Metaphysics'.
“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.”
“… divine love is not something belonging to God: it is God Himself.”
“What the mystic finds waiting for him, then, is a humanity which has been prepared to listen to his message by other mystics invisible and present in the religion which is actually taught.” - 'The Two Sources Of Morality And Religion', 1932.
"The only cure for vanity is laughter. And the only fault that’s laughable is vanity."
“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.”
“What philosophy has lacked most of all is precision.”
“When we make the cerebral state the beginning of an action, and in no sense the condition of a perception, we place the perceived images of things outside the image of our body and thus replace perception within the things themselves.”
“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.”
“You will obtain a vision of matter that is perhaps fatiguing for your imagination, but pure and stripped of what the requirements of life make you add to it in external perception.”
“The emotion felt by a man in the presence of nature certainly counts for something in the origin of religions.”
Famous Henri Bergson Quotes
Read some of the most famous Henri Bergson quotes, below.
"I cannot escape the objection that there is no state of mind, however simple, that does not change every moment."
- 'An Introduction To Metaphysics', Putnam's Sons, 1903.
“The motive power of democracy is love”
“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.”
"Intelligence is characterized by a natural incomprehension of life."
“Laughter is the corrective force which prevents us from becoming cranks.”
“All the pieces have been arranged with a view to the best possible funk”
“Some other faculty than the intellect is necessary for the apprehension of reality.”
“There is no greater joy than that of feeling oneself a creator. The triumph of life is expressed by creation.”
“It is of man’s essence to create materially and morally, to fabricate things and to fabricate himself. Homo faber is the definition I propose … Homo faber, Homo sapiens, I pay my respects to both, for they tend to merge.”
“All the living hold together, and all yield to the same tremendous push.” - 'Creative Evolution', 1907.
“The eyes see only what the mind is prepared to comprehend.”
“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.” - 'The Two Sources Of Morality And Evolution'.
"...Men do not sufficiently realize
that their future is in their own hands."
"Each step of the journey is made by following the heart instead of following the crowd and by choosing knowledge over the veils of ignorance."
“However spontaneous it seems, laughter always implies a kind of secret freemasonry, or even complicity, with other laughers, real or imaginary.” - 'An Essay On The Meaning Of The Comic Source'.
“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.” - 'The Creative Mind: An Introduction To Metaphysics'.
“It seems that laughter needs an echo.”
"The prestige of the Nobel Prize is due to many causes, but in particular to its twofold idealistic and international character"
"To think intuitively is to think in duration."
“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.”
“Life does not proceed by the association and addition of elements, but by dissociation and division.”
“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.”
“To exist is to change, to change is to mature, to mature is to go on creating oneself endlessly.” - 'Creative Evolution', 1907.
“There is nothing in philosophy which could not be said in everyday language.”
“All that we have felt, thought, and willed from our earliest infancy is there, leaning over the present which is about to join it, pressing against the portals of consciousness that would fain leave it outside.”
“All the translations of a poem in all possible languages may add nuance to nuance and, by a kind of mutual retouching, by correcting one another, may give an increasingly faithful picture of the poem they translate, yet they will never give the inner meaning of the original.”
“Only those ideas that are least truly ours can be adequately expressed in words.”
“That diversion of life towards mechanism is the real cause of laughter”
“Action on the move creates its own route, creates to a very great extent the conditions under which it is to be fulfilled and thus baffles all calculation.”
“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 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.”
