Time and Free Will

In the processes of art we shall find, in a weakened form, a refined and in some measure spiritualized version of the processes commonly used to induce the state of hypnosis.

What makes hope such an intense pleasure is the fact that the future, which we dispose of to our liking, appears to us at the same time under a multitude of forms, equally attractive and equally possible. Even if the most coveted of these becomes realized, it will be necessary to give up the others, and we shall have lost a great deal. 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.
The emotions of joy and sorrow. Their successive stages correspond to qualitative changes in the whole of our psychic states.

Indeed, it is by the intensity of the sensation that we judge of the greater or less amount of work accomplished: intensity then remains,

But it may be asked whether the insurmountable difficulties presented by certain philosophical problems do not arise from our placing side by side in space phenomena which do not occupy space, and whether, by merely getting rid of the clumsy symbols round which we are fighting, we might not bring the fight to an end

"If a man were to inquire of Nature the reason of her creative activity, and if she were willing to give ear and answer, she would say — 'Ask me not, but understand in silence, even as I am silent and am not wont to speak.'"

Indeed, the whole of Professor Bergson's philosophy centres round his conception of real concrete duration and the specific feeling of duration which our consciousness has when it does away with convention and habit and gets back to its natural attitude.