David Bohm Quotes

Observe yourself as you go through a typical day. Stuff happens to you. As it does, you immediately judge it and label it. Dozens of times. Hundreds of times. So often that you no longer recognize that you're doing it. It is a deep-seated habit.

Every suggested idea produces a corresponding physical reaction. Every idea constantly repeated ends by being engraved upon the brain, provoking the act which corresponds to that idea.

In a sense, habits never really disappear. Once formed, they always remain in our neurology.

The discovery of the habit loop is important because it reveals a basic truth: When a habit emerges, the brain stops fully participating in decision making. It stops working so hard, or diverts focus to other tasks.

If you allow your perceptions to be dominated by a status-quo perspective these thought forms create a network of status-quo mental habit patterns.

A child might be made to bow every time he met a certain person by pressure on his neck muscles, and bowing would finally become automatic. It would not, however, be an act of recognition or deference on his part, till he did it with a certain end in view - as having a certain meaning.

We are what we think we are. The habitual inclination of our thoughts determines our talents and abilities, and our personality. So whatever you want to be, start to develop that pattern now.

I truly believe that many of the fears we have are unnecessary. It is something we've been taught. It has been programmed into us. It's just a habitual thinking pattern, and it can be changed.

When you repeat a new pattern often, you literally change the neural pathways in your brain. This shift helps true change settle in.

Meditation may also be thought of as a technique by which we diminish the force of old thought habits and develop new ones.

If you would listen, sir, in the sense of being aware of your conflicts and contradictions without forcing them into any particular pattern of thought, perhaps they might altogether cease.

If you stay in that new flow of positive behavior, it's hard to revert back to old patterns. But if you do fall off, just forgive yourself, recover quickly, and get right back on.

For every habit we have, for every experience we go through over and over, for every pattern we repeat, there is a NEED WITHIN US for it.

But countless studies have shown that a cue and a reward, on their own, aren't enough for a new habit to last. Only when your brain starts expecting the reward--craving the endorphins or sense of accomplishment--will it become automatic to lace up your jogging shoes each morning. The cue, in addition to triggering a routine, must also trigger a craving for the reward to come.

Habits are powerful, but delicate. They can emerge outside our consciousness, or can be deliberately designed. They often occur without our permission, but can be reshaped by fiddling with their parts. They shape our lives far more than we realize—they are so strong, in fact, that they cause our brains to cling to them at the exclusion of all else, including common sense.

The superstition in which we grew up, Though we may recognize it, does not lose Its power over us.-Not all are free Who make mock of their chains.

I suspect that Jesus spoke many of his parables as a kind of sad and holy joke and that that may be part of why he seemed reluctant to explain them because if you have to explain a joke, you might as well save your breath.

When we consciously and deliberately develop new and better habits, our self image tends to outgrow the old habits and grow into the new pattern.

It was a pity thoughts always ran the easiest way, like water in old ditches.

At bottom there is but one subject of study: the forms and metamorphoses of mind. All other subjects may be reduced to that; all other studies bring us back to this study.

Mathematics may be a way of developing physically, that is anatomically, new connections in the brain.

Those who live alone slide into the habit of vertical eating: why bother with the niceties when there's no one to share or censure? But laxity in one area may lead to derangement in all.

Ordinary, said Aunt Lydia, is what you are used to. This may not seem ordinary to you now, but after a time it will. It will become ordinary.

These arguments on each side (and many more might be produced) are so plausible, that I am apt to suspect, they may, the one as well as the other, be solid and satisfactory, and that reason and sentiment concur in almost all moral determinations and conclusions.

Writers, some of us, may tend to see things before other people do, things that are right there but aren't noticed in the way that a writer might notice.