Henri Bergson Biography Quotes 32 Report mistakes

Early life and education
Henri-Louis Bergson was born in Paris on 18 October 1859 into a cosmopolitan, Jewish family that bridged artistic and Anglo-French worlds. His father, Michel (Michal) Bergson, was a Polish-born pianist and composer, while his mother was English, and the household frequently moved between French and English milieus. Bilingual from an early age, he absorbed both cultures. In Paris he attended the Lycee Fontanes (later the Lycee Condorcet), where he excelled in both the sciences and the humanities, winning distinction in mathematics before choosing to devote himself to philosophy. He entered the Ecole Normale Superieure, the elite training ground for French intellectuals, studying under figures such as Emile Boutroux and immersing himself in the history of philosophy from the Greeks to modern thinkers. After success in the national agrégation in philosophy, he began a career as a secondary-school teacher, with early posts in Angers and Clermont-Ferrand. During these years he prepared the work that would make his reputation, while also completing a Latin thesis on Aristotle to accompany his principal French dissertation.

Academic career and major works
Bergson's doctoral thesis, Essai sur les donnees immediates de la conscience (Time and Free Will, 1889), set out his signature idea of duree, or lived duration, opposing the treatment of time as a homogeneous, spatialized quantity. He argued that inner time is qualitative, interpenetrating, and creative, and that confusing it with space leads to false problems about freedom and determinism. Returning to Paris, he taught at the Lycee Henri-IV and then climbed the academic ranks. In 1896 he published Matiere et memoire (Matter and Memory), a provocative study of perception and memory that sought to reconcile realism about the external world with an account of consciousness as action-oriented selection. He distinguished between habit memory and pure memory, linking memory to freedom and to the continuity of the self.

Public recognition widened with Le Rire (Laughter, 1900), a concise analysis of the comic in everyday life, and the celebrated essay Introduction a la metaphysique (1903). L'Evolution creatrice (Creative Evolution, 1907) became a sensation, offering a bold reinterpretation of biological evolution as an open, creative process propelled by elan vital, the vital impetus. This book made him one of the most visible philosophers in Europe and beyond. In Paris he was elected to a chair at the College de France, where his lectures drew large crowds that included writers, artists, and scientists.

Ideas and philosophical profile
Bergson's philosophy turns on a contrast between two ways of knowing: the intellect, which divides and immobilizes for the sake of practical action and science, and intuition, a disciplined method of entering into the flow of reality to grasp duration from within. He did not reject science; rather, he argued that the tools of analysis and measurement inevitably spatialize time and thus cannot capture the qualitative continuity of life and consciousness. In Matter and Memory he developed a layered account of the body as a center of action surrounded by images, showing how perception selects for usefulness. Creative Evolution extended these themes to life as such, criticizing mechanistic and finalist accounts alike and presenting evolution as inventive rather than merely combinatorial.

In later works he elaborated moral and religious philosophy. Les Deux Sources de la morale et de la religion (The Two Sources of Morality and Religion, 1932) distinguishes between closed morality, rooted in social pressure and habit, and open morality, animated by the appeal of heroes and mystics whose love breaks closed circles. He explored static and dynamic religion, linking the latter to creative emotion and the mystical impulse. Throughout, he insisted that philosophy must return to immediate experience rather than build abstract systems detached from life.

Circles, interlocutors, and influence
Bergson's rise coincided with wide debate. In France, writers such as Charles Peguy championed him in the pages of the Cahiers de la Quinzaine, and novelists like Marcel Proust found in the analysis of time and memory a vocabulary resonant with their own projects; Bergson married Louise Neuberger in 1892, often noted as a cousin of Proust, and the families moved in overlapping circles of the Parisian belle epoque. Romain Rolland, a Nobel laureate in literature, admired the spiritual scope of Bergson's thought. In the United States, William James enthusiastically introduced Bergson to an anglophone audience, highlighting convergences with pragmatism while acknowledging differences about the status of experience and novelty. Their mutual respect helped catalyze Bergson's international reception, and his visits to Britain and America drew overflow audiences.

Not all reactions were favorable. Bertrand Russell, among others, criticized Bergson's method as insufficiently precise and at odds with the achievements of mathematical logic. The tensions between philosophical and scientific conceptions of time came to a head in Bergson's public encounter with Albert Einstein in Paris in the early 1920s. Bergson's Duree et simultaneite (1922) scrutinized the philosophical import of relativity, and Einstein famously replied that the time of the physicist is not that of the philosopher. The debate sharpened the boundaries between scientific models and lived temporality. Later generations, including Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Gilles Deleuze, rediscovered Bergson's insights into embodiment, perception, and creativity, drawing them into phenomenology and postwar French philosophy. Political thinkers such as Georges Sorel drew energy from Bergson's stress on creativity and action, while Catholic philosophers like Jacques Maritain engaged critically with his account of intuition and the spiritual.

Public life, honors, and institutions
Bergson's public stature made him a figure of national culture. He was elected to the Academie francaise in 1914. During the First World War he undertook diplomatic missions for the French government, including to Spain and to the United States, where he explained the Allied cause and cultivated intellectual ties. In the 1920s he served as president of the International Commission on Intellectual Cooperation of the League of Nations, an early venture in organized cultural diplomacy and a precursor to later institutions dedicated to education and science. His achievements were recognized by the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1927, awarded for the rich and vitalizing quality of his thought and style, which combined philosophical originality with unusual literary grace.

Personal life and character
By all accounts Bergson was courteous, reserved, and intensely devoted to teaching and writing. His marriage to Louise Neuberger provided a connection to some of the literary salons of the time, while his own classes at the College de France became a meeting ground for students, poets, and scientists. He and his wife had a daughter, and in later life he suffered from worsening arthritis, which limited his mobility and eventually led him to retire from regular teaching. Even as physical pain increased, he continued to refine and publish essays, later gathered in volumes that clarified his method of intuition and its relation to scientific inquiry.

Later years and death
The 1930s brought both intellectual consolidation and political darkness. The Two Sources of Morality and Religion (1932) was his last major book, returning to the theme of creativity in the ethical and spiritual life. As antisemitic laws spread in Europe and then in occupied France, Bergson's public stance was noted. Although he had long expressed admiration for Catholic thought and drew deeply from Christian mystics in his work on open morality, he chose to remain within Judaism. In a much-cited late statement he indicated that solidarity with Jews under persecution weighed decisively in that choice. He refused special dispensations that might have exempted him from discriminatory measures. Bergson died in Paris on 4 January 1941, during a winter of hardship in the occupied city.

Legacy
Bergson's impact cut across philosophy, literature, and the arts. His reorientation of time, memory, and creativity offered a counterpoint to mechanistic and deterministic pictures that dominated at the turn of the century. Novelists, from Proust to those exploring stream-of-consciousness techniques, found in duree a conceptual ally; poets and dramatists drew on his reflections on laughter and the comic. In philosophy, the legacy is contested but enduring. Critics like Russell pushed for a stricter analytic methodology, and physicists, following Einstein, compartmentalized scientific time from lived duration. Yet phenomenologists and process philosophers rediscovered Bergson as a resource for thinking embodiment, perception, and becoming. Deleuze's mid-twentieth-century return to Bergson emphasized multiplicity, intuition, and the critique of spatialized time, contributing to a broad revival.

Today Bergson stands as a classic figure of modern thought: a philosopher who insisted that reality, for beings like us, is not a succession of frozen instants but a flowing, creative passage; who taught that to understand freedom we must enter into duration rather than measure it from without; and who explored how science, morality, and religion can each speak truthfully when their limits and aims are rightly grasped. His life, spanning from the high tide of the Third Republic to the disasters of World War II, connected intellectual audacity with public service and personal courage, leaving a body of work that continues to inspire debate and invention.

Our collection contains 32 quotes who is written by Henri, under the main topics: Witty One-Liners - Ethics & Morality - Wisdom - Truth - Funny.

Other people realated to Henri: Charles Peguy (Philosopher), Nikos Kazantzakis (Writer), Muhammed Iqbal (Poet), Gilbert Murray (Diplomat), Jacques Maritain (Philosopher), Julien Benda (Philosopher), Georges Sorel (Philosopher), Antonio Machado (Poet), Emile Durkheim (Sociologist), Giovanni Papini (Journalist)