Henri Bergson Quotes

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.

The universe... is a machine for the making of gods.

The emotion felt by a man in the presence of nature certainly counts for something in the origin of religions.

And I also see how this body influences external images: it gives back movement to them.

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.

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.

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?

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.

... divine love is not something belonging to God: it is God Himself.

An absolute can only be given in an intuition, while all the rest has to do with analysis. We call intuition here the sympathy by which one is transported into the interior of an object in order to coincide with what there is unique andconsequently inexpressible in it. Analysis, on the contrary, is the operation which reduces the object to elements already known.

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

Some other faculty than the intellect is necessary for the apprehension of reality.

ACT as men of thought; THINK as men of action.

The only cure for vanity is laughter. And the only fault that's laughable is vanity.

To ease another's burden, help to carry it.

In reality, the past is preserved by itself automatically.

Our laughter is always the laughter of a group.

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

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.