French philosopher (1859-1941)
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.
HENRI BERGSON
Creative Evolution
Religion is to mysticism what popularization is to science. 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. Indeed his mysticism itself is imbued with this religion, for such was its starting point. His theology will generally conform to that of the theologians. His intelligence and his imagination will use the teachings of the theologians to express in words what he experiences, and in material images what he sees spiritually. And this he can do easily, since theology has tapped that very current whose source is the mystical. Thus his mysticism is served by religion, against the day when religion becomes enriched by his mysticism. This explains the primary mission which he feels to be entrusted to him, that of an intensifier of religious faith.
HENRI BERGSON
The Two Sources of Morality and Religion
To perceive means to immobilize ... we seize, in the act of perception, something which outruns perception itself.
HENRI BERGSON
Matter and Memory
Whether as a moral kink or a crooked twist given to the will, vice has often the appearance of a curvature for the soul.
HENRI BERGSON
Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic
I would say act like a man of thought and think like a man of action.
HENRI BERGSON
speech at the Descartes Conference in Paris, 1937
The living being is above all a thoroughfare, and ... the essence of life is in the movement by which life is transmitted.
HENRI BERGSON
Creative Evolution
If life realizes a plan, it ought to manifest a greater harmony the further it advances, just as the house shows better and better the idea of the architect as stone is set upon stone. If, on the contrary, the unity of life is to be found solely in the impetus that pushes it along the road of time, the harmony is not in front, but behind.
HENRI BERGSON
Creative Evolution
However spontaneous it seems, laughter always implies a kind of secret freemasonry, or even complicity, with other laughers, real or imaginary.
HENRI BERGSON
Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic
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
Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic
On the other hand, the pleasure caused by laughter, even on the stage, is not an unadulterated enjoyment; it is not a pleasure that is exclusively esthetic or altogether disinterested. It always implies a secret or unconscious intent, if not of each one of us, at all events of society as a whole. In laughter we always find an unavowed intention to humiliate, and consequently to correct our neighbour, if not in his will, at least in his deed.
HENRI BERGSON
Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic
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. Even if the most coveted of these becomes realized, it will be necessary to give up the others, and we shall have lost a great deal.
HENRI BERGSON
Time and Free Will
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
Time and Free Will
For a conscious being, to exist is to change, to change is to mature, to mature is to go on creating oneself endlessly.
HENRI BERGSON
Creative Evolution
Laughter appears to stand in need of an echo, Listen to it carefully: it is not an articulate, clear, well-defined sound; it is something which would fain be prolonged by reverberating from one to another, something beginning with a crash, to continue in successive rumblings, like thunder in a mountain.
HENRI BERGSON
Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic
The present contains nothing more than the past, and what is found in the effect was already in the cause.
HENRI BERGSON
Creative Evolution
Unfortunately, two concurrent forces constantly threaten our peace of mind. First, poor mortals imagine that good or malevolent gods watch over them, follow them about, spy on them and interfere at every turn. They look upon lightning as an omen or a punishment and tremble at the sound of thunder. They believe that supernatural forces are everywhere present; they imagine that they see them rise up before them from all sides, like the bogies that frighten children during the night. Then death itself appears to them, not as an agent of deliverance, but as the gateway to hell, the grim reaper, and every conceivable form of torture. The result of all this is that they devote their lives to fearing the gods and death; this dual superstition is a constant source of anxiety and crime; it poisons their lives and corrupts their happiness and their morality.
HENRI BERGSON
The Philosophy of Poetry
The universe is a machine for making gods.
HENRI BERGSON
The Two Sources of Morality and Religion
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. And he has said only one thing because he has seen only one point: and at that it was not so much a vision as a point of contact.
HENRI BERGSON
The Creative Mind: An Introduction to Metaphysics
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
The Creative Mind: An Introduction to Metaphysics
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.
HENRI BERGSON
Creative Evolution