Henri Bergson Quotes

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.

As we have said, when one wishes to prepare a glass of sugared water one is obliged to wait until the sugar melts. This necessity for waiting is the significant fact. It shows that if one can cut out from the universe the systems for which time is only an abstraction, a relation, a number, the universe itself becomes something different. If we could grasp it in its entirety, inorganic but interwoven with organic beings, we should see it ceaselessly taking on forms as new, as original, as unforeseeable as our states of consciousness.

understanding, whose role is to operate on stable elements, can seek stability either in relations or in things. In so far as it works on relational concepts, it ends in scientific symbolism. In so far as it operates on concepts of things, it ends in metaphysical symbolism. But in either case the arrangement comes from it. It would willingly believe itself independent. Rather than recognizing at once what it owes to the deep intuition, of reality, it is exposed to what is only seen in all its work, to an artificial arrangement of symbols. With the result that if one keeps to the letter of what metaphysicians and scholars say, as well as to the content of what they do, one might believe that the first have dug a deep tunnel under reality, while the others have thrown over it an elegant bridge, but that the moving river of things passes between these two works of art without touching them.

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.

The remembrance of forbidden fruit is the earliest thing in the memory of each of us, as it is in that of mankind.

En nous faisant saisir dans une intuition unique des moments
multiples de la durée, elle nous dégage du mouvement
d’écoulement des choses, c’est-à-dire du rythme de la nécessité.

A flexible vice may not be so easy to ridicule as a rigid virtue.

Time is invention and nothing else.

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

I cannot escape the objection that there is no state of mind, however simple, that does not change every moment.

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

But this metaphysics, like this science, has enfolded its deeper life in a rich tissue of symbols, forgetting something that, while science needs symbols for its analytical development, the main object of metaphysics is to do away with symbols.

Sentar-se no meio de uma fala seria lembrar que se tem corpo. Napoleão, que era psicólogo nas horas vagas,
observou que se passa da tragédia à comédia pelo simples fato de se sentar.

I am of the opinion that an entirely new light would illuminate many psychological and psycho-physiological questions if we recognised that distinct perception is merely cut, for the purposes of practical existence, out of a wider canvas. In psychology and elsewhere, we like to go from the part to the whole, and our customary system of explanation consists in reconstructing ideally our mental life with simple elements, then in supposing that the combination of these elements has really produced our mental life. If things happened this way, our perception would as a matter of fact be inextensible; it would consist of the assembling of certain specific materials, in a given quantity, and we should never find anything more in it than what had been put there in the first place. But the facts, taken as they are, without any mental reservation about providing a mechanical explanation of the mind, suggest an entirely different interpretation. They show us, in normal psychological life, a constant effort of the mind to limit its horizon, to turn away from what it has a material interest in not seeing. Before philosophizing one must live; and life demands that we put on blinders, that we look neither to the right, nor to the left nor behind us, but straight ahead in the direction we have to go. Our knowledge, far from being made up of a gradual association of simple elements, is the effect of a sudden dissociation: from the immensely vast field of our virtual knowledge, we have selected, in order to make it into actual knowledge, everything which concerns our action upon things; we have neglected the rest.