Success Quote by Henri Bergson

Bergson is calling out a cheat our brains perform so smoothly we mistake it for reality: we turn motion into a picture. A runner is never actually in the single, clean pose we remember or paint. He is a blur of micro-positions, a continuum. Yet perception “contracts” those thousands of instants into a symbolic snapshot - a leg extended, torso pitched forward - and that emblem becomes the public’s shorthand for running itself.

The intent is philosophical but also slyly diagnostic. Bergson is attacking the habit of spatializing time: treating duration like a strip of still frames we can stack, measure, and possess. Science, common sense, and even language collaborate in this illusion, because symbols are efficient. They let the eye and mind stabilize what is inherently unstable. Art, in his telling, doesn’t merely depict movement; it codifies the perceptual shortcut, reproducing the pose that feels like motion while quietly erasing the lived flow that made motion real.

The subtext is a warning about what we lose when we privilege the symbol over the process. Once “the image of a man who runs” hardens into the accepted icon, it starts to replace the messy, unfolding experience of running - the strain, acceleration, hesitation, and fatigue that can’t be pinned to one posture. Written in an era fascinated by chronophotography and early cinema, Bergson is pushing back against a modern faith that breaking life into frames equals understanding it. His runner is less an athlete than a metaphor for consciousness itself: always becoming, always misremembered as a still.