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

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 Quote

Genius is that which forces the inertia of humanity to learn.
- Henri Bergson Quote

I cannot escape the objection that there is no state of mind, however simple, that does not change every moment.
- Henri Bergson Quote

I see plainly how external images influence the image that I call my body: they transmit movement to it.
- Henri Bergson Quote

In just the same way the thousands of successive positions of a runner are contracted into one sole symbolic attitude, which our eye perceives, which art reproduces, and which becomes for everyone the image of a man who runs.
- Henri Bergson Quote

In laughter we always find an unavowed intention to humiliate and consequently to correct our neighbour.
- Henri Bergson Quote

Instinct perfected is a faculty of using and even constructing organized instruments; intelligence perfected is the faculty of making and using unorganized instruments.
- Henri Bergson Quote

Intelligence is the faculty of making artificial objects, especially tools to make tools.
- Henri Bergson Quote

Life does not proceed by the association and addition of elements, but by dissociation and division.
- Henri Bergson Quote

Our laughter is always the laughter of a group.
- Henri Bergson Quote

Sex appeal is the keynote of our civilization.
- Henri Bergson Quote

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 Quote

The major task of the twentieth century will be to explore the unconscious, to investigate the subsoil of the mind.
- Henri Bergson Quote

The motive power of democracy is love.
- Henri Bergson Quote

The present contains nothing more than the past, and what is found in the effect was already in the cause.
- Henri Bergson Quote

There is no greater joy than that of feeling oneself a creator. The triumph of life is expressed by creation.
- Henri Bergson Quote

There is nothing in philosophy which could not be said in everyday language.
- Henri Bergson Quote

To exist is to change, to change is to mature, to mature is to go on creating oneself endlessly.
- Henri Bergson Quote

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 Quote

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.
- Henri Bergson Quote

Wherever anything lives, there is, open somewhere, a register in which time is being inscribed.
- Henri Bergson Quote