Pour un être conscient, exister consiste à changer, changer à se mûrir, se mûrir à se créer indéfiniment soi-même. - Henri Bergson

[Duration is] the form which the succession of our conscious states assumes when our ego lets itself live, when it refrains from separating its present state from its former state.

All the living hold together, and all yield to the same tremendous push. The animal takes its stand on the plant, man bestrides animality, and the whole of humanity, in space and in time, is one immense army galloping beside and before and behind each of us in an overwhelming charge able to beat down every resistance and clear the most formidable obstacles, perhaps even death.

One currently and perhaps imprudently calls “reason” this conservative logic which governs thought in common; conversation greatly resembles conservation. It is there that it is at home. And there it exercises a legitimate authority. Theoretically, in fact, conversation should bear only upon things of the social life. And the essential object of society is to insert a certain fixity into universal mobility. Societies are just so many islands consolidated here and there in the ocean of becoming.