Henri Bergson Quotes on Time
Bergson's Time and Free Will (1889) and the later Creative Evolution (1907) reorganize the philosophy of time around the distinction between durée — the qualitative, indivisible flow of inner experience — and the spatialized clock-time of measurement, which Bergson argues is a useful symbolic projection rather than the lived temporal reality. The free act, the creative novelty of biological evolution, and the structure of memory each turn out, on the Bergsonian framework, to require a notion of duration irreducible to the homogeneous time of mathematical physics. The framework defined the early-twentieth-century continental philosophical scene, shaped Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Deleuze, and remains the principal philosophical alternative to the eternalist B-theory of time that has dominated analytic metaphysics.
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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“The present contains nothing more than the past, and what is found in the effect was already in the cause.”
Creative Evolution (1907), Chapter I, as translated by Arthur Mitchell (1911), p. 14.; italicized in the original. -
Attributed to Henri Bergson:
“Wherever anything lives, there is, open somewhere, a register in which time is being inscribed.”
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“I cannot escape the objection that there is no state of mind , however simple , that does not change every moment .”
An Introduction to Metaphysics (1903), translated by T. E. Hulme . New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1912, p. 44 -
“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 -
“The spectacle of what religions have been in the past, of what certain religions still are to-day, is indeed humiliating for human intelligence. What a farrago of error and folly!'”
The Two Sources of Morality and Religion(1932) | Chapter II : Static Religion