Henri Bergson Quotes

French - Philosopher October 18, 1859 - January 4, 1941

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

Henri Bergson

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

Henri Bergson

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

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

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

Henri Bergson

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

Henri Bergson

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

Henri Bergson

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

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

Henri Bergson