Henri Bergson Quotes

A thousand years ago, scientists who wondered about consciousness and the nature of reality were burned at the stake. We still haven't recovered from that and it's left us with a culture that no longer investigates consciousness, except on the fringes.

Mental events, it is said, are not passive happenings but the acts of a subject.

Our own physical body possesses a wisdom which we who inhabit the body lack. We give it orders which make no sense.

Daniel Dennett is our best current philosopher. He is the next Bertrand Russell. Unlike traditional philosophers, Dan is a student of neuroscience, linguistics, artificial intelligence, computer science, and psychology. He's redefining and reforming the role of the philosopher.

A Deed knocks first at Thought And then - it knocks at Will - That is the manufacturing spot.

Thinking is the desire to gain reality by means of ideas.

Walking shares with making and working that crucial element of engagement of the body and the mind with the world, of knowing the world through the body and the body through the world.

Waves of thought are stirring. In a twilight corner of her consciousness, one tiny fragment and another tiny fragment call out wordlessly to eachother, their spreading ripples intermingling.

What is essential in the life of a man of my kind is what he thinks and how he thinks, and not what he does or suffers.

Either one does not dream, or one does so interestingly. One should learn to spend one's waking life in the same way: not at all, or interestingly.

All our thoughts and concepts are called up by sense-experiences and have a meaning only in reference to these sense-experiences. On the other hand, however, they are products of the spontaneous activity of our minds; they are thus in no wise logical consequences of the contents of these sense-experiences. If, therefore, we wish to grasp the essence of a complex of abstract notions we must for the one part investigate the mutual relationships between the concepts and the assertions made about them; for the other, we must investigate how they are related to the experiences.

To bring the tools of science and to recognize that the flaw in the Cartesian Duality and to bring the tools of science to look at this question of mind and consciousness and to explore it using the tools of science â€" instead of saying, as has been the tradition for 400 years, that consciousness is not a proper subject for science to look at.

I only read biographies, metaphysics and psychology. I can dream up my own fiction.

Everything is a reenactment. We are reenacting the world in the mind. The world is not inside there. It does not reside in the gray matter of the brain.

Intuition was not just visual but also auditory and kinesthetic. Those who watched Feynman in moments of intense concentration came away with a strong, even disturbing sense of the physicality of the process, as though his brain did not stop with the grey matter but extended through every muscle in his body.

Remember, when we're conscious of something, that state is quite often generated by unconscious processes that happen right before it.

Strictly speaking, you don't think: Thinking happens to you.

We exist solely because we have a body and a mind ? a mind that arises out of the body. If this were true, we would cease to exist after our body was gone.

If we are to know ourselves, philosophy needs to maintain an ongoing dialogue with the sciences of mind.

It is a misconception to think that during evolution humans sacrificed physical skill in exchange for intelligence: wielding one's body is a mental activity.

Doing is very good, but that comes from thinking. Little manifestations of energy through the muscles are called work. But where there is no thought, there will be no work. Fill the brain, therefore, with high thoughts, highest ideals, place them day and night before you, and out of that will come great work.

There is no thought in any mind, but it quickly tends to convert itself into power.

Lightning seems a thought, which instead of being attached to a brain, is attached to an electric current.

The eye of understanding is like the eye of the sense; for as you may see great objects through small crannies or levels, so you may see great axioms of nature through small and contemptible instances.

Keep thinking. You can hear our brains rattling around inside us, like the littler Russian dolls.