True Mystics Are Great Men Of Action Henri Bergson

"TRUE MYSTICS SIMPLY OPEN THEIR SOULS TO THE ONCOMING WAVE. SURE OF THEMSELVES, BECAUSE THEY FEEL WITHIN THEM SOMETHING BETTER THAN THEMSELVES, THEY PROVE TO BE GREAT MEN OF ACTION, TO THE SURPRISE OF THOSE FOR WHOM MYSTICISM IS NOTHING BUT VISIONS, AND RAPTURES AND ECSTASIES. That which they have allowed to flow into them is a stream flowing down and seeking through them to reach their fellow-men; the necessity to spread around them what they have received affects them like an onslaught of love. A love which each one of them stamps with his own personality. A love which is in each of them an entirely new emotion, capable of transposing human life into another tone. A love which thus causes each of them to be loved for himself, so that through him, and for him, other men will open their souls to the love of humanity. A love which can be just as well passed on through the medium of a person who has attached himself to them or to their evergreen memory and formed his life on that pattern."

- HENRI BERGSON, "Deux Sources de la Morale et de la Religion" (The Two Sources of Morality and Religion, 1935)