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Happiness Quote by Henri Bergson

"There is no greater joy than that of feeling oneself a creator. The triumph of life is expressed by creation"

About this Quote

Bergson makes creation sound less like a hobby and more like a bodily proof of being alive. “No greater joy” is an absolutist claim, but it’s also a rhetorical dare: if modern life feels dulled by routine, it’s because we’ve mistaken living for functioning. The line pivots on “feeling oneself a creator,” not being crowned one by an institution. Joy comes from the inside-out recognition that you can introduce novelty into the world, even in small, local ways. That emphasis matches Bergson’s larger project: rescuing lived time, spontaneity, and becoming from the mechanized, clockwork view of existence.

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.

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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.

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About the Author

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Henri Bergson (October 18, 1859 - January 4, 1941) was a Philosopher from France.

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