By the sole fact of being accomplished, reality casts its shadow behind it into the indefinitely distant past: it thus seems to have been pre-existent to its own realization, in the form of a possible. From this results an error which vitiates our conception of the past; from this arises our claim to anticipate the future on every occasion.

— Henri Bergson

Henri Bergson Quotes

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?

— Henri Bergson

Genius is that which forces the inertia of humanity to learn.

— Henri Bergson

There are manifold tones of mental life, or, in other words, our psychic life may be lived at different heights, now nearer to action, now further removed from it, according to the degree of our attention to life.

— Henri Bergson

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

— Henri Bergson

Time is invention and nothing else.

— Henri Bergson

Creation signifies, above all, emotion, and that not in literature or art alone. We all know the concentration and effort implied in scientific discovery. Genius has been defined as an infinite capacity for taking pains.

— Henri Bergson

No two moments are identical in a conscious being.

— Henri Bergson

The question is precisely to know whether the past has ceased to exist, or ceased to be useful...

— Henri Bergson

What philosophy has lacked most of all is precision.

— Henri Bergson

The world that our senses and our consciousness habitually acquaint us with is now nothing more than the shadow of itself; and it is cold like death.

— Henri Bergson

Social thought is unable not to keep its original structure.

— Henri Bergson

Disorder is simply the order we are not looking for.

— Henri Bergson

All the pieces have been arranged with a view to the best possible funk.

— Henri Bergson

The Eyes See Only What The Mind Is Prepared To Comprehend.

— Henri Bergson

We seize, in the act of perception, something which outruns perception itself.

— Henri Bergson

Matter and mind have this in common, that certain superficial agitations of matter are expressed in our minds, superficially, in the form of sensations; and on the other hand, the mind, in order to act upon the body, must descend little by little toward matter and become spatialized. It follows that the intelligence, although turned toward external things, can still be exerted on things internal, provided that it does not claim to plunge too deeply.

— Henri Bergson

In reality, life is no more made of physico-chemical elements than a curve is composed of straight lines.

— Henri Bergson

Materiality begets oblivion.

— Henri Bergson

By the sole fact of being accomplished, reality casts its shadow behind it into the indefinitely distant past: it thus seems to have been pre-existent to its own realization, in the form of a possible. From this results an error which vitiates our conception of the past; from this arises our claim to anticipate the future on every occasion.

— Henri Bergson

One currently and perhaps imprudently calls “reason” this conservative logic which governs thought in common; conversation greatly resembles conservation. It is there that it is at home. And there it exercises a legitimate authority. Theoretically, in fact, conversation should bear only upon things of the social life. And the essential object of society is to insert a certain fixity into universal mobility. Societies are just so many islands consolidated here and there in the ocean of becoming.

— Henri Bergson
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