On novelty

This is worth living for: that I can imagine as hard as I wish, I can mentally construct in the maximum detail of which I am capable the most mundane of future events, build a daydream out of things I already know, but that despite my best efforts, the future is always absolutely novel. Each moment I am alive is a complete surprise, and never more than when I am in fact experiencing things for the first time. May he who denies life novelty come face to face with himself in the realization that every moment runs aground all his expectations, and this, instead, is what it is like.

From Henri Bergson's The Creative Mind:

Our action exerts itself conveniently only on fixed points; fixity is therefore what our intelligence seeks; it asks itself where the mobile is to be found, where it will be, where it will pass. ... But it is always with immobilities, real or possible, that it seeks to deal.
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But how can we help seeing that the essence of duration is to flow, and that the fixed placed side by side with the fixed will never constitute anything which has duration.
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Intuition is what attains the spirit, duration, pure change.
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To think intuitively is to think in duration.
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Criticism of an intuitive philosophy is so easy and so certain to be well received that it will always tempt the beginner.
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[When thinking intuitively] our mind is as if it were in a strange land, whereas matter is familiar to it and in it the mind is at home. But that is because a certain ignorance of self is perhaps useful to a being which must exteriorize itself in order to act.
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This direct vision of the mind by the mind is the chief function of intuition.
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True, the faculty of intuition exists in each one of us, but covered over by functions more useful to life.
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Man is essentially a manufacturer.