Top 60 David Bohm Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “Real dialogue is where two or more people become willing to suspend their certainty in each other’s presence.”

— David Bohm

2. “In Nature nothing remains constant. Everything is in a perpetual state of transformation, motion and change.”

— David Bohm

3. “Thought runs you. Thought, however, gives false info that you are running it, that you are the one who controls it. Whereas actually thought is the one which controls each one of us.”

— David Bohm

4. “To change your reality you have to change your inner thoughts.”

— David Bohm

5. “We are all linked by a fabric of unseen connections. This fabric is constantly changing and evolving. This field is directly structured and influenced by our behavior and by our understanding.”

— David Bohm

6. “Space is not empty. It is full, a plenum as opposed to a vacuum, and is the ground for the existence of everything, including ourselves. The universe is not separate from this cosmic sea of energy.”

— David Bohm

7. “The ability to perceive or think differently is more important than the knowledge gained.”

— David Bohm

8. “Deep down the consciousness of mankind is one. This is a virtual certainty because even in the vacuum matter is one; and if we don’t see this, it’s because we are blinding ourselves to it.”

— David Bohm

9. “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

10. “Individuality is only possible if it unfolds from wholeness.”

— David Bohm

Featured in: Individuality Quotes

11. “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

12. “Can we learn to become more learning-oriented individually and collectively, rather than ‘I know’ oriented?”

— David Bohm

13. “The notion of a separate organism is clearly an abstraction, as is also its boundary. Underlying all this is unbroken wholeness even though our civilization has developed in such a way as to strongly emphasize the separation into parts.”

— David Bohm

14. “What is needed is to learn afresh, to observe, and to discover for ourselves the meaning of wholeness.”

— David Bohm

15. “Universe consists of frozen light.”

— David Bohm

16. “Ultimately, all moments are really one, therefore now is an eternity.”

— David Bohm

17. “In the long run, it is far more dangerous to adhere to illusion than to face what the actual fact is.”

— David Bohm

18. “Then there is the further question of what is the relationship of thinking to reality. As careful attention shows, thought itself is in an actual process of movement.”

— David Bohm

19. “Perhaps there is more sense in our nonsense and more nonsense in our ‘sense’ than we would care to believe.”

— David Bohm

20. “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

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

— David Bohm

22. “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

23. “The essential feature in quantum interconnectedness is that the whole universe is enfolded in everything, and that each thing is enfolded in the whole.”

— David Bohm

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

— David Bohm

25. “Thought is creating divisions out of itself and then saying that they are there naturally.”

— David Bohm

26. “In this flow, mind and matter are not separate substances. Rather, they are different aspects of one whole and unbroken movement.”

— David Bohm

27. “During the past few decades, modern technology, with radio, TV, air travel, and satellites, has woven a network of communication which puts each part of the world in to almost instant contact with all the other parts.”

— David Bohm

28. “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

29. “On the contrary, when one works in terms of the implicate order, one begins with the undivided wholeness of the universe, and the task of science is to derive the parts through abstraction from the whole, explaining them as approximately separable, stable and recurrent, but externally related elements making up relatively autonomous sub-totalities, which are to be described in terms of an explicate order.”

— David Bohm

30. “Ego-centeredness is not individuality at all.”

— David Bohm

31. “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

32. “Being guided by a fragmentary self-world view, man then acts in such a way as to try to break himself and the world up, so that all seems to correspond to his way of thinking. Man thus obtains an apparent proof of the correctness of his fragmentary self-world view though, of course, he overlooks the fact that it is he himself, acting according to his mode of thought, who has brought about the fragmentation that now seems to have an autonomous existence, independent of his will and of his desire.”

— David Bohm

33. “Your questions contain hidden assumptions; that’s the point. Therefore, when you question the question itself, you may be questioning a deeper assumption. But that’s done non-verbally. Do you see what I mean? To question the question eventually has to be a non-verbal act, which you can’t describe.”

— David Bohm

34. “Pribram has given evidence backing up his suggestion that memories are generally recorded all over the brain in such a way that information concerning a given object or quality is not stored in a particular cell or localized part of the brain but rather that all the information is enfolded over the whole.”

— David Bohm

35. “So what is needed is for man to give attention to his habit of fragmentary thought, to be aware of it, and thus bring it to an end. Man’s approach to reality may then be whole, and so the response will be whole.”

— David Bohm

36. “Another problem of fragmentation is that thought divides itself from feeling and from the body. Thought is said to be the mind; we have the notion that it is something abstract or spiritual or immaterial. Then there is the body, which is very physical. And we have emotions, which are perhaps somewhere in between. The idea is that they are all different. That is, we think of them as different. And we experience them as different because we think of them as different.”

— David Bohm

37. “The holomovement which is ‘life implicit’ is the ground both of ‘life explicit’ and of ‘inanimate matter’, and this ground is what is primary, self-existent and universal. Thus we do not fragment life and inanimate matter, nor do we try to reduce the former completely to nothing but an outcome of the latter.”

— David Bohm

38. “I regard the essence of the notion of process as given by the statement: Not only is everything changing, but all is flux. That is to say, what is the process of becoming itself, while all objects, events, entities, conditions, structures, etc., are forms that can be abstracted from this process.”

— David Bohm

39. “Intelligence and material process have thus a single origin, which is ultimately the unknown totality of universal flux. In a certain sense, this implies that what have been commonly called mind and matter are abstractions from the universal flux, and that both are to be regarded as different and relatively autonomous orders within the one whole movement... It is thought responding to intelligent perception which is capable of bringing about an overall harmony of fitting between mind and matter.”

— David Bohm

40. “One might then suggest that in intelligent perception, the brain and nervous system respond directly to an order in the universal and unknown flux that cannot be reduced to anything that could be defined in terms of knowable structures.”

— David Bohm

41. “Yet, in spite of this world-wide system of linkages, there is, at this very moment, a general feeling that communication is breaking down everywhere, on an unparalleled scale.”

— David Bohm

42. “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

43. “And thought struggles against the results, trying to avoid those unpleasant results while keeping on with that way of thinking. That is what I call ’sustained incoherence.”

— David Bohm

44. “It is especially important to consider this question today, for fragmentation is now very widespread, not only throughout society, but also in each individual; and this is leading to a kind of general confusion of the mind, which creates an endless series of problems and interferes with our clarity of perception so seriously as to prevent us from being able to solve most of them.”

— David Bohm

45. “The most essential aspects of this philosophy seem to the author, however, to be its assumption that the great diversity of things that appear in all of our experience, every day as well as scientific, can all be reduced completely and perfectly to nothing more than consequences of the operation of an absolute and final set of purely quantitative laws determining the behaviour of a few kinds of basic entities or variables.”

— David Bohm

46. “One must then go on to a consideration of time as a projection of multidimensional reality into a sequence of moments.”

— David Bohm

47. “What is called for is not an integration of thought, or a kind of imposed unity, for any such imposed point of view would itself be merely another fragment. Rather, all our different ways of thinking are to be considered as different ways of looking at the one reality, each with some domain in which it is clear and adequate.”

— David Bohm

48. “There is a difficulty with only one person changing. People call that person a great saint or a great mystic or a great leader, and they say, ‘Well, he’s different from me – I could never do it.’ What’s wrong with most people is that they have this block – they feel they could never make a difference, and therefore, they never face the possibility, because it is too disturbing, too frightening.”

— David Bohm

49. “One may speculate that perhaps in ancient times, the men who were wise enough to see that the immeasurable is the primary reality were also wise enough to see that measure is insight into a secondary and dependent but nonetheless necessary aspect of reality.”

— David Bohm

50. “So the relationship of each moment in the whole to all the others is implied by its total content: the way in which it ‘holds’ all the others enfolded within it.”

— David Bohm