Henri Louis Bergson Quotes (9 Quotes)

There is, beneath these sharply cut crystals and this frozen surface, a continuous flux which is not comparable to any flux I have ever seen. There is a succession of states, each of which anounces that which follows and contains that which precedes it....

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.

The vital spirit. Lelan vital.

Art has no other object than to set aside the symbols of practical utility, the generalities that are conventionally and socially accepted,everything in fact which masks reality from us, in order to set us face to face with reality itself.

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....

Only those ideas that are least truly ours can be adequately expressed in words.

We are free when our actions emanate from our total personality, when they express it, when they resemble it in the indefinable way a work of art sometimes does the artist.

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.

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.