Henri Bergson Quotes

There is nothing so captivating as new knowledge.

Every addition to true knowledge is an addition to human power

In my own life, I found that whenever I wasn't sure what to do next, I would go and learn a lot, read a lot, talk to experts. I don't know how the human brain works, but it's almost magical: when you read enough or talk to enough experts, when you have enough inputs, new ideas start appearing. This seems to happen for a lot of people that I know.

The most powerful thing in the world is an idea.

Many of the world’s great movements, of thought and action, have flowed from the work of a single man.

Education is the foundation of social progress and economic development.

What seems impossible today, may half a century hence have become commonplace.

To work in a treadmill all one's life, to wear oneself to the bone all one's days, is not conducive to the outflowering of genius. If we desire a real crop of great art, great poetry, great thinking, we must provide the proper conditions.

Gene Roddenbury felt that television was being wasted. That it had the potential for enlightenment and even inspiration.

I don't know what else teaches you as much as writing. Perhaps reading. So if I don't have one or the other in the course of the day, I feel old.

Reading changes your perspective and feeds your imagination.

There are geniuses, savants; I'm not one of them. I work hard, I see where popular culture's going to move, but I've gotta keep having information pumped into me. I look under every rock.

Our understanding of the world is achieved more effectively by conceptual improvements than by discovery of new facts

Some great minds become great by turning the rubble of an exploded paradigm into something consistent and meaningful. Others become great by laying the gunpowder, grain by grain. Every important revolution needs both kinds of minds to complete itself.

New perspectives give birth to new historic ages. Humankind has had many dramatic revolutions of understanding - great uses of fire and the wheel, language and writing. We found that the earth only seems flat, the sun only seems to circle the earth, matter only seems solid.

Everyone is a genius at least once a year.

Too often we forget that genius, too, depends upon the data within its reach, that even Archimedes could not have devised Edison's inventions.

A great discovery is a fact whose appearance in science gives rise to shining ideas, whose light dispels many obscurities and shows us new paths.

The only geniuses produced by the chaos of society are those who do something about it. Chaos breeds geniuses. It offers a man something to be a genius about.

I join you therefore in branding as cowardly the idea that the human mind is incapable of further advances.

Big data will never give you big ideas... Big data doesn't facilitate big leaps of the imagination. It will never conjure up a PC revolution or any kind of paradigm shift. And while it might tell you what to aim for, it can't tell you how to get there

Let us leave to the brain what belongs to it, and agree that the work of the men of genius is of the superhuman, the offspring of man.

If special honor is claimed for any, then heresy should have it as the truest servitor of human kind.

But these few are the salt of the earth; without them, human life would become a stagnant pool. Not only is it they who introduce good things which did not before exist, it is they who keep the life in those which already existed.

Genius is a light which makes the darkness visible, like the lightning's flash, which perchance shatters the temple of knowledge itself.