Daily Inspiration Quote by Henri Bergson

Bergson is picking a fight with the camera-eye fantasy of the mind: the notion that perception is a clean window onto reality. For him, to perceive is already to arrest motion, to carve a still frame out of something fundamentally in flux. “Immobilize” is the tell. Perception doesn’t merely receive; it edits. It selects, simplifies, and pins down what is otherwise continuous change, because action demands manageable objects, not endless becoming.

The second clause sharpens the provocation. In “we seize... something which outruns perception itself,” Bergson names the paradox that makes his philosophy hum: the world’s movement exceeds the concepts and snapshots we use to grasp it. We “seize” in order to cope, but what we seize is never the whole; it’s a pragmatic reduction, a handle. The verb choice matters here too. Seizing is tactile, urgent, even slightly violent, implying that perception is an intervention, not a passive mirroring.

Contextually, this sits inside Bergson’s broader case for duree, lived duration, against the spatialized time of clocks and the intellect’s habit of turning processes into things. He’s writing in an era intoxicated by measurement, industrial tempo, and the prestige of mechanistic science; his rebuttal isn’t anti-science so much as anti-confusion. Don’t mistake your useful freeze-frames for the movie. The subtext is a warning: when you treat perception’s stills as reality, you don’t just misunderstand time - you misunderstand life, consciousness, and everything that depends on movement to be itself.