David Bohm Quotes

How does the subconscious mind work? Is it independent of the conscious mind? Is it programmed by experiences or instructions? Many questions come up, but the one answer is common: if you can access the subconscious, then you can reprogram it, period!

Our thoughts are mainly controlled by our subconscious, which is largely formed before the age of 6, and you cannot change the subconscious mind by just thinking about it.

We are infected by our own misunderstanding of how our own minds work.

One comes to believe whatever one repeats to oneself sufficiently often, whether the statement be true of false. It comes to be dominating thought in one's mind.

Very bad things follow when we kid ourselves that we're naturally rational, rather than the more humbling truth: naturally emotional.

False thinking and false ideologies, dressed in the most pleasing forms, quietly - almost without our knowing it - seek to reduce our moral defenses and to captivate our minds. They entice with bright promises of security, cradle-to-grave guarantees of many kinds.

Human beings are the only creatures who are able to behave irrationally in the name of reason.

In my preaching the shafts are ever aimed at the brainwashed horde.

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.

We find it hard to believe that other people's thoughts are as silly as our own, but they probably are.

There are mighty few people who think what they think they think.

The most important thing when you study hypnosis is that you learn that humans are irrational. Until you understand that, hypnosis is hard to do... For me, it was this great awakening to understand that humans are deeply irrational, and it's probably the greatest influence on me in terms of my writing.

If you lend your consciousness to someone else, you're a robot.

Humans are lazy but not stupid.

You have to realise that hypnosis doesn't exist: it just works on people's natural suggestibility, their expectations and capacity to unconsciously role play. You can't make someone do anything they don't want to do.

Our brains are very, very good at self-delusion. What happens is, it releases the stress hormone cortisol in the brain, which leads to foggy thinking, so you're not even able to judge well whether you're working well or not.

I surely don't think ignorance is bliss. But like everything else that has survived thousands of years of human evolution, ignorance - like denial, self-delusion, and magical thinking - seems to have its uses.

Your mind doesn't know the difference between reality and fantasy. Your mindacts on what you feed it. Feed it good thoughts.

The habit patterns of the human mind are very strong and make it seem that the hard way is easy and the easy way is hard.

Men who cannot deceive others are very often successful at deceiving themselves.

What tricks the mind is what the mind is glad to be tricked by.

Once you think a thought, it is extremely difficult to unthink it.

And then he thought: Is this how idiots rationalize their stupidity to themselves?

Man is always prey to his truths. Once he has admitted them, he cannot free himself from them.

The subconscious is like having a laboratory assistant who pretends to love you and help you, but after you go home to go to sleep it goes back into the lab and starts fumbling with the data and destroying it. It's a very tricky thing. People think our minds are us, but that's not true at all. The mind is not us.