Top 60 Henri Bergson Quotes (2024 Update)

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

— Henri Bergson

2. “Think like a man of action, act like a man of thought.”

— Henri Bergson

3. “The Eyes See Only What The Mind Is Prepared To Comprehend.”

— Henri Bergson

4. “The present contains nothing more than the past, and what is found in the effect was already in the cause.”

— Henri Bergson

5. “Time is invention and nothing else.”

— Henri Bergson

6. “The universe is a machine for the making of Gods.”

— Henri Bergson

7. “Life does not proceed by the association and addition of elements, but by dissociation and division.”

— Henri Bergson

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

— Henri Bergson

9. “There is no greater joy than that of feeling oneself a creator. The triumph of life is expressed by creation.”

— Henri Bergson

10. “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.”

— Henri Bergson

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

— Henri Bergson

12. “To ease another’s burden, help to carry it.”

— Henri Bergson

13. “Intelligence is characterized by a natural incomprehension of life.”

— Henri Bergson

14. “Religion is to mysticism what popularization is to science.”

— Henri Bergson

15. “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.”

— Henri Bergson

16. “Only those ideas that are least truly ours can be adequately expressed in words.”

— Henri Bergson

17. “ACT as men of thought; THINK as men of action.”

— Henri Bergson

18. “Disorder is simply the order we are not looking for.”

— Henri Bergson

19. “Genius is that which forces the inertia of humanity to learn.”

— Henri Bergson

20. “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.”

— Henri Bergson

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

— Henri Bergson

22. “The motive power of democracy is love.”

— Henri Bergson

23. “The only cure for vanity is laughter. And the only fault that’s laughable is vanity.”

— Henri Bergson

24. “No two moments are identical in a conscious being.”

— Henri Bergson

25. “To drive out the darkness, bring in the light.”

— Henri Bergson

26. “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.”

— Henri Bergson

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

— Henri Bergson

28. “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?”

— Henri Bergson

29. “There is nothing in philosophy which could not be said in everyday language.”

— Henri Bergson

30. “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.”

— Henri Bergson

31. “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

32. “It is emotion that drives the intelligence forward in spite of obstacles.”

— Henri Bergson

33. “The movement of the stream is distinct from the river bed, although it must adopt its winding course.”

— Henri Bergson

34. “Laughter is, above all, a corrective. Being intended to humiliate, it must make a painful impression on the person against whom it is directed. By laughter, society avenges itself for the liberties taken with it. It would fail in its object if it bore the stamp of sympathy or kindness.”

— Henri Bergson

35. “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.”

— Henri Bergson

36. “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.”

— Henri Bergson

37. “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.”

— Henri Bergson

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

— Henri Bergson

39. “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.”

— Henri Bergson

40. “It is the very essence of intelligence to coordinate means with a view to a remote end, and to undertake what it does not feel absolutely sure of carrying out.”

— Henri Bergson

41. “Matter and mind have this in common, that certain superficial agitations of matter are expressed in our minds, superficially, in the form of sensations; and on the other hand, the mind, in order to act upon the body, must descend little by little toward matter and become spatialized. It follows that the intelligence, although turned toward external things, can still be exerted on things internal, provided that it does not claim to plunge too deeply.”

— Henri Bergson

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

— Henri Bergson

43. “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.”

— Henri Bergson

44. “Materiality begets oblivion.”

— Henri Bergson

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

— Henri Bergson

46. “All the pieces have been arranged with a view to the best possible funk.”

— Henri Bergson

47. “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.”

— Henri Bergson

48. “In reality, life is no more made of physico-chemical elements than a curve is composed of straight lines.”

— Henri Bergson

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

— Henri Bergson

50. “We regard intelligence as man’s main characteristic and we know that there is no superiority which intelligence cannot confer on us, no inferiority for which it cannot compensate.”

— Henri Bergson