immobilities

The first kind of knowledge has the advantage of enabling us to foresee the future and of making us in some measure masters of events; in return, it retains of the moving reality only eventual immobilities, that is to say, views taken of it by our mind.

Evolution créatrice. English Henri Bergson 1900

But it always considers moments, always virtual stopping-places, always, in short, immobilities.

Evolution créatrice. English Henri Bergson 1900

The purpose of these acknowledgments of past immobilities and present awakenings is to announce the visionary intention of the poem.

Passion and Romantic Poetics 1998

When it substitutes for movement immobilities put together, it does not pretend to reconstitute the movement such as it actually is; it merely replaces it with a practical equivalent.

Evolution créatrice. English Henri Bergson 1900

But the possibility of applying the movement _to_ the line traversed exists only for an observer who keeping outside the movement and seeing at every instant the possibility of a stop, tries to reconstruct the real movement with these possible immobilities.

Evolution créatrice. English Henri Bergson 1900

Unless it does violence to itself, it takes the opposite course; it always starts from immobility, as if this were the ultimate reality: when it tries to form an idea of movement, it does so by constructing movement out of immobilities put together.

Evolution créatrice. English Henri Bergson 1900

But with these successive states, perceived from without as real and no longer as potential immobilities, you will never reconstitute movement.

Evolution créatrice. English Henri Bergson 1900

The movement slips through the interval, because every attempt to reconstitute change out of states implies the absurd proposition, that movement is made of immobilities.

Evolution créatrice. English Henri Bergson 1900

At bottom, the illusion arises from this, that the movement, _once effected_, has laid along its course a motionless trajectory on which we can count as many immobilities as we will.

Evolution créatrice. English Henri Bergson 1900

The abrupt and faltering intonations of the deep voice; the taciturnity put on like an armor; the deliberate, as if guarded, movements; the long immobilities, as if the man he watched had been afraid to disturb the very air: every familiar gesture, every word uttered in his hearing, every sigh overheard, had acquired a special significance, a confirmatory import.

Youth And Two Other Stories 1899