"There is no greater joy than that of feeling oneself a creator. The triumph of life is expressed by creation"
About this Quote
The subtext is a quiet rebuke to two forces that defined his era: industrial standardization and intellectual systems that treat reality as fixed and fully explainable. For Bergson, to reduce life to what can be measured is to miss its essential feature: it generates the new. “Triumph” here isn’t conquest; it’s insistence. Life wins by refusing to be merely repetitive, by outgrowing its previous form.
The phrasing also smuggles in an ethics. If the highest joy is creative agency, then a society that blocks ordinary people from making, changing, experimenting is not just unjust but anti-vital. Read against the early 20th century’s mass politics and mass production, Bergson’s sentence becomes a defense of individuality without turning into mere self-branding: creation is how life testifies for itself, a spiritual argument delivered in the language of momentum and movement.
Quote Details
| Topic | Art |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
| Cite |
Citation Formats
APA Style (7th ed.)
Bergson, Henri. (2026, January 17). There is no greater joy than that of feeling oneself a creator. The triumph of life is expressed by creation. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/there-is-no-greater-joy-than-that-of-feeling-24119/
Chicago Style
Bergson, Henri. "There is no greater joy than that of feeling oneself a creator. The triumph of life is expressed by creation." FixQuotes. January 17, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/there-is-no-greater-joy-than-that-of-feeling-24119/.
MLA Style (9th ed.)
"There is no greater joy than that of feeling oneself a creator. The triumph of life is expressed by creation." FixQuotes, 17 Jan. 2026, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/there-is-no-greater-joy-than-that-of-feeling-24119/. Accessed 12 Feb. 2026.








