French philosopher (1859-1941)
Comic absurdity is of the same nature as that of dreams.
HENRI BERGSON
Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic
The metaphor never goes very far, anymore than a curve can long be confused with its tangent.
HENRI BERGSON
Creative Evolution
How can the soul recover the tranquility which it has lost? It must be shown that the gods take no part in the daily lives of men, and that death is the end of everything. Only through this knowledge will the soul regain possession of itself.
HENRI BERGSON
The Philosophy of Poetry
The major task of the twentieth century will be to explore the unconscious, to investigate the subsoil of the mind.
HENRI BERGSON
The Dream
Only those ideas which least belong to us can be adequately expressed in words.
HENRI BERGSON
Time and Free Will
At the root of the comic there is a sort of rigidity which compels its victims to keep strictly to one path, to follow it straight along, to shut their ears and refuse to listen.
HENRI BERGSON
Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic
There is, between our body and other bodies, an arrangement like that of the pieces of glass that compose a kaleidoscopic picture. Our activity goes from an arrangement to a re-arrangement, each time no doubt giving the kaleidoscope a new shake, but not interesting itself in the shake, and seeing only the new picture. Our knowledge of the operation of nature must be exactly symmetrical, therefore, with the interest we take in our own operation.
HENRI BERGSON
Creative Evolution
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
Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic
I cannot escape the objection that there is no state of mind, however simple, that does not change every moment.
HENRI BERGSON
An Introduction to Metaphysics
No two moments are identical in a conscious being.
HENRI BERGSON
The Creative Mind: An Introduction to Metaphysics
The pure present is an ungraspable advance of the past devouring the future. In truth, all sensation is already memory.
HENRI BERGSON
Matter and Memory
Life is like a current passing from germ to germ through the medium of a developed organism.
HENRI BERGSON
Creative Evolution
Evolution does not mark out a solitary route ... it takes directions without aiming at ends ... it remains inventive even in its adaptations.
HENRI BERGSON
Creative Evolution
Instead of attaching ourselves to the inner becoming of things, we place ourselves outside them in order to recompose their becoming artificially. We take snapshots, as it were, of the passing reality, and, as these are characteristic of the reality, we have only to string them on a becoming abstract, uniform and invisible, situated at the back of the apparatus of knowledge, in order to imitate what there is that is characteristic in this becoming itself.
HENRI BERGSON
Creative Evolution
The universe is simmering down, like a giant stew left to cook for four billion years. Sooner or later we won't be able to tell the carrots from the onions.
HENRI BERGSON
The World Within the World
The sole function of philosophy is to lead us to happiness by way of the shortest possible route.
HENRI BERGSON
The Philosophy of Poetry
The open society is one that is deemed in principle to embrace all humanity.
HENRI BERGSON
The Two Sources of Morality and Religion
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
Matter and Memory
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?
HENRI BERGSON
An Introduction to Metaphysics
Wherever anything lives, there is, open somewhere, a register in which time is being inscribed.
HENRI BERGSON
Creative Evolution