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
against consciousness earliest fain follows french-scientist infancy join leaning leave portals present
In its entirety, probably, it follows us at every instant; all that we have felt, thought and willed from our earliest infancy is there, leaning over the present which is about to join it, pressing against the portals of consciousness that would fain leave it outside.
action birth cannot centre destined move object
My body, an object destined to move other objects, is, then, a centre of action ; it cannot give birth to a representation.
cure fault french-scientist laughable vanity
The only cure for vanity is laughter, and the only fault that is laughable is vanity.
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.
act means perceive perception
To perceive means to immobilize. We seize, in the act of perception, something which outruns perception itself.
intelligence tools faculty
In short, intelligence, considered in what seems to be its original feature, is the faculty of manufacturing artificial objects, especially tools to make tools, and of indefinitely urging the manufacture.
nature men emotion
The emotion felt by a man in the presence of nature certainly counts for something in the origin of religions.
imagination vision perception
You will obtain a vision of matter that is perhaps fatiguing for your imagination, but pure and stripped of what the requirements of life make you add to it in external perception.
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. . . .
faith giving may
All the translations of a poem in all possible languages may add nuance to nuance and, by a kind of mutual retouching, by correcting one another, may give an increasingly faithful picture of the poem they translate, yet they will never give the inner meaning of the original.
happiness laughter joy
Our laughter is always the laughter of a group.
children hands trying
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?
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.