Henri Bergson Quotes on Knowledge
Henri Bergson (1859–1941), whose Time and Free Will (1889), Matter and Memory (1896), and Creative Evolution (1907) gave early-twentieth-century French philosophy its most influential metaphysical voice, defended throughout his career a fundamental distinction between two modes of knowing. The discursive intellect, formed by the practical needs of manipulation, knows the world by spatializing analysis into discrete elements that can be operationally combined; intuition, by contrast, gives access to the inner duration of the things themselves through a sympathetic placing of oneself within the temporal flux that the analytic intellect can describe only after the fact and only by approximation. The framework grounds Bergson's distinctive criticisms of mechanism, scientism, and Eleatic metaphysics.
Quotes
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Attributed to Henri Bergson:
“The eye sees only what the mind is prepared to comprehend.”
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Attributed to Henri Bergson:
“Intelligence is characterised by a natural incomprehension of life.”
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“The prestige of the Nobel Prize is due to many causes, but in particular to its twofold idealistic and international character: idealistic in that it has been designed for works of lofty inspiration; international in that it is awarded after the production of different countries has been minutely studied and the intellectual balance sheet of the whole world has been drawn up. Free from all other c”
In a letter accepting the 1927 Nobel Prize in literature , read by the French minister, Armand Bernard. -
“Je dirais qu'il faut agir en homme de pensée et penser en homme d'action.”
I would say act like a man of thought and think like a man of action . Speech at the Descartes Conference in Paris (1937) | Quoted in The Forbes Scrapbook of Thoughts on the Business of Life (1950), p. 442, as " Think like a man of action, act like a man of thought. -
“Intuition is a method of feeling one's way intellectually into the inner heart of a thing to locate what is unique and inexpressible in it.”
Quoted in Georgia O'Keeffe, 1887-1986 : Flowers in the Desert (2000) by Britta Benke, p. 28