Henri Bergson
Henri Bergson
Henri-Louis Bergsonwas a major French philosopher, influential especially in the first half of the 20th century. Bergson convinced many thinkers that the processes of immediate experience and intuition are more significant than abstract rationalism and science for understanding reality...
NationalityFrench
ProfessionPhilosopher
Date of Birth18 October 1859
CountryFrance
philosophical body movement
I see plainly how external images influence the image that I call my body : they transmit movement to it.
philosophical mind tasks
The major task of the twentieth century will be to explore the unconscious, to investigate the subsoil of the mind.
responsibility men hands
...Men do not sufficiently realize that their future is in their own hands. Theirs is the task of determining first of all whether they want to go on living or not. Theirs is the responsibility, then, for deciding if they want merely to live, or intend to make just the extra effort required for fulfilling, even on this refractory planet, the essential function of the universe, which is a machine for the making of gods.
psychics different attention
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.
humanity genius force
Genius is that which forces the inertia of humanity to learn.
happiness laughter joy
Our laughter is always the laughter of a group.
laughter intention neighbour
In laughter we always find an unavowed intention to humiliate and consequently to correct our neighbour.
running art attitude
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.
house perception body
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.
nature real order
Thus to seek with ready-made concepts to penetrate into the inmost nature of things is to apply to the mobility of the real a method created in order to give stationary points of observation on it. . . .
philosophy believe taken
I believe that the time given to refutation in philosophy is usually time lost. Of the many attacks directed by many thinkers against each other, what now remains? Nothing, or assuredly very little. That which counts and endures is the modicum of positive truth which each contributes. The true statement is, of itself, able to displace the erroneous idea, and becomes, without our having taken the trouble of refuting anyone, the best of refutations.
machines universe
The universe is a machine for the making of Gods.
act means perceive perception
To perceive means to immobilize. We seize, in the act of perception, something which outruns perception itself.
call external french-scientist images transmit
I see plainly how external images influence the image that I call my body: they transmit movement to it.