David Bohm Quotes

55 Sourced Quotes

Culture is shared meaning. Suppose we were able to share meanings freely without a compulsive urge to impose our view or conform to those of others and without distortion and self-deception. Would this not constitute a real revolution in culture.

David Bohm
Similarly, thought is a system. That system not only includes thought and feelings, but it includes the state of the body; it includes the whole of society - as thought is passing back and forth between people in a process by which thought evolved from ancient times.

David Bohm
In relativity, movement is continuous, causally determinate and well defined, while in quantum mechanics it is discontinuous, not causally determinate and not well defined. Each theory is committed to its own notions of essentially static and fragmentary modes of existence (relativity to that of separate events, connectable by signals, and quantum mechanics to a well-defined quantum state). One thus sees that a new kind of theory is needed which drops these basic commitments and at most recovers some essential features of the older theories as abstract forms derived from a deeper reality in which what prevails in unbroken wholeness.

David Bohm
The notion of absolute truth is... is shown to be in poor correspondence with the actual development of science.... Scientific truths are better regarded as relationships holding in some limited domain.

David Bohm
It is frequently realised that half the battle is over when we know what are the right questions to ask.

David Bohm
It is proposed that a form of free dialogue may well be one of the most effective ways of investigating the crisis which faces society, and indeed the whole of human nature and consciousness today. Moreover, it may turn out that such a form of free exchange of ideas and information is of fundamental relevance for transforming culture and freeing it of destructive misinformation, so that creativity can be liberated.

David Bohm
If each one of us can give full attention to what is actually 'blocking' communication while he is also attending properly to the content of what is communicated, then we may be able to create something new between us, something of very great significance for bringing to an end the at present insoluble problems of the individual and of society.

David Bohm
Indeed, the laws of chance are just as necessary as the causal laws themselves.

David Bohm
If you engage in positive thinking to overcome negative thoughts, the negative thoughts are still there acting. That's still incoherence. It's not enough just to engage in positive thoughts when you have negative thoughts registered, because they keep on working and will cause trouble somewhere else.

David Bohm
But the puzzle is, what happened before time began?

David Bohm
So one begins to wonder what is going to happen to the human race. Technology keeps on advancing with greater and greater power, either for good or for destruction.

David Bohm
What is needed is to learn afresh, to observe, and to discover for ourselves the meaning of wholeness.

David Bohm
The treatment of the indeterminacy principle as absolute and final can then be criticized as constituting an arbitrary restriction on scientific theories, since it does not follow from the quantum theory as such, but rather from the assumption of the unlimited validity of certain of its features, an assumption that can in no way ever be subjected to experimental proof.

David Bohm
Anybody can use science and technology without fundamentally altering his own frame of mind which governs how they are used.

David Bohm
When we come to light, we are coming to the fundamental activity in which existence has its ground... Light is the potential of everything.

David Bohm
We could say that practically all the problems of the human race are due to the fact that thought is not proprioceptive.

David Bohm
I would put it another way: people had insight in the past about a form of intelligence that had organized the universe and they personalized it and called it "God."

David Bohm
The question of relevance comes before that of truth, because to ask whether a statement is true or false presupposes that it is relevant (so that to try to assert the truth or falsity of an irrelevant statement is a form of confusion)...

David Bohm
From the point of view of the species, death is part of this whole process. You could say that species have evolved in such a way that individual members last a certain time. Perhaps a certain kind of species would be better able to survive if the individuals didn't last too long. Other kinds could last longer.

David Bohm
Thought is constantly creating problems that way and then trying to solve them. But as it tries to solve them it makes it worse because it doesn't notice that it's creating them, and the more it thinks, the more problems it creates.

David Bohm
If we can be cheered up by positive images we can be depressed by negative ones. As long as we accept images as realities we are in that trap, because you can't control the images.

David Bohm
We have the idea that after we have been thinking something, it just evaporates. But thinking doesn't disappear. It goes somehow into the brain and leaves something-a trace-which becomes thought. And thought then acts automatically.

David Bohm
This is another major feature of thought: Thought doesn't know it is doing something and then it struggles against it is doing. It doesn't want to know that it is doing it.

David Bohm
Thus, in a dialogue each person does not attempt to make common certain ideas or items of information that are already known to him. Rather, it can be said that collectively they are making something in common

David Bohm
Eternity can be affected by what happens in time.

David Bohm
We can't simply take the way things seem and just work on that, because that would be another kind of mistake thought makes-taking the surface and calling it the reality.

David Bohm
But the way people commonly use the word nowadays it means something all of whose parts are mutually interdependent - not only for their mutual action, but for their meaning and for their existence.

David Bohm
Matter is like a small ripple on this tremendous ocean of energy, having some relative stability and being manifest.

David Bohm
This ocean of energy could be thought of as an ocean of light.

David Bohm
Man's general way of thinking of the totality, i. e. his general world view, is crucial for overall order of the human mind itself. If he thinks of the totality as constituted of independent fragments, then that is how his mind will tend to operate, but if he can include everything coherently and harmoniously in an overall whole that is undivided, unbroken and without border (for every border is a division or break) then his mind will tend to move in a similar way, and from this will flow an orderly action within the whole.

David Bohm