Henri Bergson

“Yaşama tüm ciddiliğini bizim özgürlüğümüz kazandırır. Olgunlaştırdığımız duygular, içimizde gizlediğimiz tutkular, karar verip uyguladığımız eylemler; kısacası, bizden gelen, tümüyle bizim olan şeyler. İşte yaşama kimi zaman dramatik, genellikle de ciddi bir hava veren bunlardır. Bütün bunları komedyaya dönüştürmek için ne gereklidir. O görünürdeki özgürlüğümüzün altında iplerden oluşan bir düzeneğin yattığını ve bizlerin, ozanın dediği gibi, şu ölümlü dünyada,...İpleri yazgının elindeZavallı kuklalarolduğumuzu düşünmek gereklidir. Öyleyse düş gücünün bu basit imgeyi çağrıştırarak komiğe kadar götürmeyeceği hiçbir gerçek, ciddi, hatta dramatik sahne yoktur. Önü bu kadar geniş bir alana açık olan bir oyun da yoktur.”

“When it is said that an object occupies a large space in the soul or even that it fills it entirely, we ought to understand by this simply that its image has altered the shade of a thousand perceptions or memories, and that in this sense it pervades them, although it does not itself come into view.”

“Might not certain vices have the same relation to character that the rigidity of a fixed idea as to intellect? Whether as a moral kink or a crooked twist given to the will, vice has often the appearance of a curvature for the soul. Doubtless there are vices into which the soul plunges deeply with all its pregnant potency, which it rejuvenates and drags along with it into a moving circle of reincarnations. Those are tragic vices. But the vice capable of making us comic is, on the contrary, that which is brought from without, like a ready-made frame into which we are to step. It lends us its own rigidity instead of borrowing from us our flexibility. We do not render it more complicated; on the contrary, it simplifies us. Here, as we shall see later in the concluding section of this study, lies the essential difference between comedy and drama. A drama, even when portraying passions or vices that bear a name, so completely incorporates them that the person is forgotten, their general characteristics effaced, and we no longer think of them at all, but rather of the person in whom they are assimilated; hence, the title of a drama can seldom be anything else than a proper noun. On the other hand, many comedies have a common noun as their title: L'Avare, Le Joueur etc.”

“A situation is always comic if it participates simultaneously in two series of events which are absolutely independent of each other, and if it can be interpreted in two quite different meanings.”

“The idea of the future, pregnant with an infinity of possibilities, is thus more fruitful than the future itself, and this is why we find more charm in hope than in possession, in dreams than in reality.”

“اللامبالاة هي بيئة الهزل الطبيعية”

“...Men do not sufficiently realizethat their future is in their own hands.Theirs is the task of determining first of all whether they want to go on living or not.Theirs is the responsibility, then, for deciding if they want merely to live,or intend to make just the extra effort requiredfor fulfilling, even on this refractory planet,the essential function of the universe,which is a machine for the making of gods.”

“Pour un être conscient, exister consiste à changer, changer à se mûrir, se mûrir à se créer indéfiniment soi-même.”

“L'humanité gémit, à demi écrasée sous le poids des progrès qu'elle a faits. Elle ne sait pas assez que son avenir dépend d'elle.”

“But, then, I cannot escape the objection that there is no state of mind, however simple, which does not change every moment, since there is no consciousness without memory, and no continuation of a state without the addition, to the present feeling, of the memory of past moments. It is this which constitutes duration. Inner duration is the continuous life of a memory which prolongs the past into the present, the present either containing within it in a distinct form the ceaselessly growing image of the past, or, more profoundly, showing by its continual change of quality the heavier and still heavier load we drag behind us as we grow older. Without this survival of the past into the present there would be no duration, but only instantaneity.”

“To exist is to change, to change is to mature, to mature is to go on creating oneself endlessly.”

“Europe is overpopulated, the world will soon be in the same condition, and if the self-reproduction of man is not rationalized... we shall have war.”

“Sans doute une chute est toujours une chute, mais autre chose est de se laisser choir dans un puits parce qu’on regardait n’importe où ailleurs, autre chose y tomber parce qu’on visait une étoile. C’est bien une étoile que Don Quichotte contemplait.”

“Think like a man of action, act like a man of thought.”

“The pure present is an ungraspable advance of the past devouring the future. In truth, all sensation is already memory.”

“There are manifold tones of mental life, or, in other words, our psychic life may be lived at different heights, now nearer to action, now further removed from it, according to the degree of our attention to life.”

“The universe is a machine for the making of Gods.”