Henri Bergson Quotes on Life
Bergson's Creative Evolution (1907) gave early twentieth-century philosophy of life its most influential statement. Against the mechanistic and the merely teleological accounts of biological evolution, Bergson proposed the elan vital — the creative impulse of life that, unfolding under the resistance of inert matter, has produced the ascending series of biological forms culminating in human consciousness. The framework integrates with the broader Bergsonian metaphysics of duration: life is the temporal phenomenon par excellence, the genuinely novel creative production that the spatialized thought of mechanistic biology systematically misdescribes. The book defined the early-twentieth-century philosophical scene, won Bergson the 1927 Nobel Prize in Literature, and shaped the subsequent vitalist and process philosophical traditions through Whitehead, Deleuze, and twentieth-century philosophy of biology.
Quotes
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Attributed to Henri Bergson:
“To exist is to change, to change is to mature, to mature is to go on creating oneself endlessly.”
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Attributed to Henri Bergson:
“Intelligence is characterised by a natural incomprehension of life.”
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Attributed to Henri Bergson:
“Wherever anything lives, there is, open somewhere, a register in which time is being inscribed.”
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“The universe is a machine for the making of gods.”
Concluding sentences ; often just the last part of the last sentence is quoted, in the form: "The universe is a machine for making gods. -
“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 .”
Creative Evolution (1907), Chapter III. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1911, p. 271