Daily Inspiration Quote by Henri Bergson

“Sex appeal is the keynote of our civilization” lands like a philosopher’s raised eyebrow: not prudish, not celebratory, just clinically blunt about what Bergson thinks is doing the tuning. A “keynote” isn’t a stray melody; it’s the pitch everything else unconsciously harmonizes to. By choosing that musical metaphor, Bergson suggests sex appeal has stopped being a private impulse and become an organizing principle - a baseline frequency shaping taste, status, advertising, even what counts as “success.”

The line’s sting is in its compression. Bergson doesn’t say sex, desire, or eroticism; he says “sex appeal,” a modern, market-friendly term that treats attraction as a surface technology: something curated, packaged, and circulated. That phrasing hints at a civilization where the body is not only lived in but displayed, optimized, and converted into social power. The subtext isn’t that people want sex (obvious, banal), but that institutions want wanting. Desire becomes infrastructure.

Context matters: Bergson wrote in an era when mass media, department stores, cinema, and urban consumer life were rapidly professionalizing attention. His broader philosophical project wrestled with how living energy (elan vital) gets hardened into habit, routine, and mechanism. Read that way, the quote doubles as cultural diagnosis: the vital, messy force of desire has been streamlined into a civilizational signal, a shortcut for value that reduces complexity into immediate legibility.

It works because it indicts without sermonizing. One sentence, and an entire modern choreography appears: selling, self-selling, looking, being looked at - civilization as a continuous audition.