Henri Bergson Quotes

The universe is a machine for the making of Gods.

[W]ithin our ego, there is succession without mutual externality; outside the ego, in pure space, mutual externality without succession.

Nous ne voyons pas les choses mêmes ; nous nous bornons, le plus souvent, à lire des étiquettes collées sur elles.

De um mal entendido sobre isso é que nasceu a celeuma entre o realismo e o idealismo na arte. Sem dúvida, a arte nada mais é que uma visão mais direta da realidade. Mas essa pureza de percepção implica uma ruptura com a convenção utilitária, um desprendimento inato e especificamente localizado do sentido ou da consciência, enfim, certa imaterialidade de vida, que vem a ser o que sempre se chamou de idealismo. Por conseguinte, pode-se afirmar, sem jogar de modo algum com o sentido das palavras, que o realismo está na obra quando o idealismo está na alma, e que só à força de idealidade se toma contato com a realidade.

Religion is to mysticism what popularization is to science. What the mystic finds waiting for him, then, is a humanity which has been prepared to listen to his message by other mystics invisible and present in the religion which is actually taught. Indeed his mysticism itself is imbued with this religion, for such was its starting point. His theology will generally conform to that of the theologians. His intelligence and his imagination will use the teachings of the theologians to express in words what he experiences, and in material images what he sees spiritually. And this he can do easily, since theology has tapped that very current whose source is the mystical. Thus his mysticism is served by religion, against the day when religion becomes enriched by his mysticism. This explains the primary mission which he feels to be entrusted to him, that of an intensifier of religious faith.

La via che percorriamo nel tempo è cosparsa dei frammenti di tutto ciò che cominciavamo ad essere, di tutto ciò che avremmo potuto diventare.

The general intelligence which is the faculty of arranging concepts “reasonably” and handling words suitably, must therefore aid in the social life just as intelligence in the narrower sense of the word, which is the mathematical function of the mind, presides over the knowledge of matter. It is the first of these we have in mind when we say of a man that he is intelligent. By that we mean that he has the ability and the facility for combining the ordinary concepts and for drawing probable conclusions from them. One can hardly take issue with him on that account, as long as he confines himself to things of every-day life, for which the concepts were made. But one would hardly admit of a man who was merely intelligent undertaking to speak with authority on scientific questions seeing that the intellect, made precise in science, becomes a mathematical, physical and biological attitude of mind, and substitutes for words more appropriate signs. All the more should one forbid him to meddle in philosophy when the questions raised are no longer in the domain of the intelligence alone. But no, it is agreed that the intelligent man is on this point a competent man. Against this I protest most vigorously. I hold the intelligence in high esteem, but I have a very mediocre opinion of the “intelligent man,” whose cleverness consists in talking about all things with a show of truth.

Talvez não mais se chorasse numa sociedade em que só houvesse puras inteligências, mas provavelmente se risse; por outro lado, almas invariavelmente
sensíveis, afinadas em uníssono com a vida, numa sociedade onde tudo se estendesse em ressonância afetiva, nem conheceriam nem compreenderiam o
riso.

We say “universe” and the word makes us think of a possible unification of things. One can be a spiritualist, a materialist, a pantheist, just as one can be indifferent to philosophy and satisfied with common sense: the fact remains that one always conceives of one or several simple principles by which the whole of material and moral things might be explained. This is because our intelligence loves simplicity. It seeks to reduce effort, and insists that nature was arranged in such a way as to demand of us, in order to be thought, the least possible labor. It therefore provides itself with the exact minimum of elements and principles with which to recompose the indefinite series of objects and events. But if instead of reconstructing things ideally for the greater satisfaction of our reason we confine ourselves purely and simply to what is given us by experience, we should think and express ourselves in quite another way. While our intelligence with its habits of economy imagines effects as strictly proportioned to their causes, nature, in its extravagance, puts into the cause much more than is required to produce the effect. While our motto is Exactly what is necessary, nature’s motto is More than is necessary, — too much of this, too much of that, too much of everything. Reality, as James sees it, is redundant and superabundant. Between this reality and the one constructed by the philosophers, I believe he would have established the same relation as between the life we live every day and the life which actors portray in the evening on the stage. On the stage, each actor says and does only what has to be said and done; the scenes are clear-cut; the play has a beginning, a middle and an end; and everything is worked out as economically as possible with a view to an ending which will be happy or tragic. But in life, a multitude of useless things are said, many superfluous gestures made, there are no sharply-drawn situations; nothing happens as simply or as completely

You can predict an eclipse a thousand years hence, but you cannot predict what will happen when you pull a bulldog’s tail!

O humorista é no caso um moralista disfarçado em cientista, algo como um anatomista que só faça dissecação para nos desagradar; e o humor, no sentido restrito que damos à palavra, é de fato uma transposição do moral em científico.

Concordo em que Shakespeare não tenha sido nem Macbeth, nem Hamlet, nem Otelo; mas ele teria sido esses personagens diversos se as circunstâncias por um lado, e por outro o consentimento de sua vontade, houvessem levado ao estado de erupção
violenta o que nele não passava de impulso interior. E enganar-se estranhamente sobre o papel da imaginação poética acreditar que ela compõe seus heróis com pedaços tirados aqui e ali em torno dela, como para costurar uma roupa de arlequim. Nada de vivo sairia disso. A vida não se recompõe. Ela simplesmente se deixa contemplar. A imaginação poética só pode ser uma visão completa da realidade. Se os personagens criados pelo poeta nos dão a impressão de vida, é que são o próprio poeta, o poeta multiplicado, o poeta aprofundando-se a si mesmo num esforço de observação interior tão poderoso que capta o virtual no real e retoma o que a natureza deixou nele em estado de esboço ou de simples projeto para dele fazer uma obra completa.

I need not recall the arguments of Zeno of Elea. They all involve the confusion of movement with the space covered, or at least the conviction that one can treat movement as one treats space, divide it without taking account of its articulations. Achilles, they say, will never overtake the tortoise he is pursuing, for when he arrives at the point where the tortoise was the latter will have had time to go further, and so on indefinitely. Philosophers have refuted this argument in numerous ways, and ways so different that each of these refutations deprives the others of the right to be considered definitive. There would have been, nevertheless, a very simple means of making short work of the difficulty: that would have been to question Achilles. For since Achilles finally catches up to the tortoise and even passes it, he must know better than anyone else how he goes about it. The ancient philosopher who demonstrated the possibility of movement by walking was right: his only mistake was to make the gesture without adding a commentary. Suppose then we ask Achilles to comment on his race: here, doubtless, is what he will answer: “Zeno insists that I go from the point where I am to the point the tortoise has left, from that point to the next point it has left, etc., etc.; that is his procedure for making me run. But I go about it otherwise. I take a first step, then a second, and so on: finally, after a certain number of steps, I take a last one by which I skip ahead of the tortoise. I thus accomplish a series of indivisible acts. My course is the series of these acts. You can distinguish its parts by the number of steps it involves. But you have not the right to disarticulate it according to another law, or to suppose it articulated in another way. To proceed as Zeno does is to admit that the race can be arbitrarily broken up like the space which has been covered; it is to believe that the passage is in reality applied to the trajectory; it is making movement and immobil

Either there is no philosophy possible, and all knowledge of things is a practical knowledge aimed at the profit to be drawn from them, or else philosophy consists in placing oneself within the object itself by an effort of intuition.

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