- Lived:
- 1859–1941 · Paris, France
- Tradition:
- French philosophy of life; the philosophy of time, intuition, and creative evolution
- The Big Idea:
- The time of clocks and equations is a useful fiction — real time is duration, the flowing, unrepeatable melting of moments into one another that you live but can never measure.
- In their words:
- "We are free when our acts spring from our whole personality, when they express it, when they have that indefinable resemblance to it which one sometimes finds between the artist and his work." (Time and Free Will, 1889)
- If you remember one thing:
- He was once the most famous philosopher alive — and his whole philosophy grew from one insight: a clock can tell you what time it is, but it cannot tell you what time is.