Henri Bergson Quotes

There is, I conceive, no contradiction in believing that mind is at once the cause of matter and of the development of individualised human minds through the agency of matter.

It seems to me immensely unlikely that mind is a mere by-product of matter. For if my mental processes are determined wholly by the motions of atoms in my brain I have no reason to suppose that my beliefs are true. They may be sound chemically, but that does not make them sound logically. And hence I have no reason for supposing my brain to be composed of atoms.

Your life can only be as free as your perception of it

Freedom begins as we become conscious of it.

Bondage is of the mind; freedom too is of the mind. If you say 'I am a free soul. I am a son of God who can bind me' free you shall be.

I once did a radio program with a famous materialist, that is to say a scientist who believed that absolutely everything was physical and that all emotions were reductive to little electrical impulses in your neurons. And I found that I didn't believe that. But what the emotions really are, I don't have an alternative theory.

We must no more ask whether the soul and body are one than ask whether the wax and the figure impressed on it are one.

It is on the acceptance or rejection of the theory of the Unity of all in Nature, in its ultimate Essence, that mainly rests the belief or unbelief in the existence around us of other conscious beings besides the Spirits of the Dead.

Anything you believe you have to do or become before you can be free is a denial and distraction from the truth that you are already free.

A free mind is one which is untroubled and unfettered by anything, which has not bound its best part to any particular manner of being or worship and which does not seek its own interest in anything but is always immersed in God's most precious will. . . . There is no work which men and women can perform, however small, which does not draw from this its power and strength.

You are already free. You only have to know and realize this truth.

Freedom of the Spirit is the cornerstone of all freedom.

We must become free. We are free; the work is to know it. We must give up all slavery, all bondage of whatever kind. We must not only give up our bondage to earth and everything and everybody on earth, but also to all ideas of heaven and happiness.

Nature is thought immersed in matter. . .

We are dominated by everything with which our self is identified. We can dominate and control everything from which we disidentify ourselves. The normal mistake we all make is to identify ourselves with some content of consciousness rather than with consciousness itself. Some people get their identity from their feelings, others from their thoughts, others from their social roles. But this identification with a part of the personality destroys the freedom which comes from the experience of the pure “I”.

Christian liberty is freedom from sin, not freedom to sin.

Once liberty has exploded in the soul of a man, the gods can do nothing against that man.

Unlike puppets we have the possibility of stopping in our movements, looking up and perceiving the machinery by which we have been moved. In this act lies the first steps towards freedom.

I should . . . prefer swallowing one incomprehensibility rather than two. It requires one effort only to admit the single incomprehensibility of matter endowed with thought, and two to believe, first that of an existence called spirit, of which we have neither evidence nor idea, and then secondly how that spirit, which has neither extension nor solidity, can put material organs into motion.

Consciousness does affect matter.

Freedom is not a reaction; freedom is not a choice. . Freedom is found in the choiceless awareness of our daily existence and activity.

Matter is merely mind deadened by the development of habit to the point where the breaking up of these habits is very difficult.

The man of control lives in choice, and the man of understanding lives in choicelessness.

No one can take away the freedom of a man's soul.

The gospel doesn't just free me from what people think of me, but also from what I think of me.