Daily Inspiration Quote by Henri Bergson

Bergson takes a clean swipe at the comforting idea that life unfolds like a single line toward a single end. “Life is tendency” makes existence feel less like a finished thing you possess and more like a pressure you inhabit: a push, a leaning, a vector. Then he tightens the screw with that “sheaf” image. A tendency, in his telling, doesn’t express itself by staying pure and straight; it has to split as it grows. The divergence isn’t a failure of purpose but the signature of vitality.

The intent here is polemical, aimed at the era’s dominant mechanical and teleological models. Late 19th- and early 20th-century thought often treated living beings as elaborate machines or as products marching toward pre-set goals. Bergson’s counterproposal is the elan vital: not a mystical ghost in the organism, but a name for creativity in time, for novelty that can’t be reverse-engineered from initial conditions. The “impetus” dividing among “divergent directions” is evolution without the comfort of a master plan. Life improvises by branching.

Subtext: if you demand one clean story of development, you’re already misunderstanding what growth is. The branching sheaf smuggles in an ethics of humility: outcomes aren’t simply chosen or designed; they’re generated through constraint, chance, and the internal momentum of living systems. Read politically or culturally, it also sounds like a warning against monocultures of thought. Any force that’s truly alive multiplies possibilities, and it pays for that richness with fracture, competition, and unfinished narratives.