Intelligence is the faculty of making artificial objects, especially tools to make tools.
—Henri Bergson
Topics: Intelligence
Think like a man of action, and act like a man of thought.
—Henri Bergson
Religion is to mysticism what popularization is to science
—Henri Bergson
Topics: Religion
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
Topics: Intelligence
There is no greater joy than that of feeling oneself a creator. The triumph of life is expressed by creation.
—Henri Bergson
Topics: Happiness
To exist is to change, to change is to mature, to mature is to go on creating oneself endlessly.
—Henri Bergson
The only cure for vanity is laughter, and the only fault that is laughable is vanity.
—Henri Bergson
Topics: Vanity
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
Topics: Spirit, Spirituality
Wherever anything lives, there is, open somewhere, a register in which time is being inscribed.
—Henri Bergson
Topics: Time
There is no perception that is not full of memories.
—Henri Bergson
Laughter is the corrective force which prevents us from becoming cranks.
—Henri Bergson
Topics: Laughter
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 and consequently inexpressible in it. Analysis, on the contrary, is the operation which reduces the object to elements already known.
—Henri Bergson
Topics: Intuition
Some other faculty than the intellect is necessary for the apprehension of reality.
—Henri Bergson
Topics: Instincts, Reason
To perceive means to immobilize… we seize, in the act of perception, something which outruns perception itself.
—Henri Bergson
Topics: Perception
The present contains nothing more than the past, and what is found in the effect was already in the cause.
—Henri Bergson
Topics: Time, Past, The Past
Sex appeal is the keynote of our civilization
—Henri Bergson
Topics: Sex
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
Jean-Paul Sartre French Philosopher
Michel Foucault French Philosopher
Simone de Beauvoir French Philosopher
Albert Camus Algerian-born French Philosopher
Voltaire French Philosopher, Author
Georges Bataille French Essayist, Intellectual
Roland Barthes French Literary Theorist
Jacques Derrida French Philosopher, Literary Theorist
Gaston Bachelard French Philosopher
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin French Jesuit Scientist