David Bohm Quotes

You can learn a lot if you become a student of what's happening to you.

Sometimes you watch yourself, and you think, 'Oh, wow.'

It's you who are telling me; opening my eyes to things I'd looked at so long that I'd ceased to see them.

So you have to be your own teacher and your own disciple, and there is no teacher outside, no saviour, no master; you yourself have to change, and therefore you have to learn to observe, to know yourself. This learning about yourself is a fascinating and joyous business.

My most important quality or property is curiosity. And that had its beginning in what I was going to do with my life.

I guess I didn't feel confident enough to be searching in a big public way. I was very content at the time to toil in obscurity on things that I thought might point me in certain directions or teach me certain things - not knowing what that would be.

What nourishes us at home and in school is what inspires us. When we get awareness and learn about the great potential that we all human beings have, we are able to discover our leadership.

I believe that, through the act of living, the discovery of oneself is made concurrently with the discovery of the world around us.

Meditation is the most extraordinary thing if you know how to do it, and you cannot possibly learn from anybody; and that's the beauty of it. It isn't something you learn, a technique, and therefore there is no authority. Therefore if you will learn about yourself, watch yourself, watch the way you walk, the way you talk, how you eat, what you say, the gossip, the hate, the jealousy. If you are aware of it without any choice, all that is part of meditation, and as you go, as you journey, as that movement goes, all that movement is meditation. Then that movement is endless, timeless.

To understand oneself requires patience, tolerant awareness; the self is a book of many volumes which you cannot read in a day, but when once you begin to read, you must read every word, every sentence, every paragraph for in them are the intimations of the whole. The beginning of it is the ending of it. If you know how to read, supreme wisdom is to be found.

An artist is an explorer. He has to begin by self-discovery and by observation of his own procedure. After that he must not feel under any constraint.

Sometimes the best way to find out what you’re supposed to do is by doing the thing you’re not supposed to do.

When you try to understand everything, you will not understand anything. The best way is to understand yourself, and then you will understand everything.

Painting is self-discovery. You arrive at the image through the act of painting.

Wherever I go I need a period of incubation so that I may learn the essence of nature, which never wishes to be understood or yield herself.

I have learnt a good deal from my own talk.

I'm still exploring in a lot of ways. I don't know myself completely.

You take a step, then another. That's the journey. But to take a step with your eyes open is not a journey at all, it's a remaking of your own mind.

We read books to find out who we are.

To learn about oneself, a living thing, you have to watch, learn anew each minute.

The best way to find things out is not to ask questions at all. If you fire off a question, it is like firing off a gun - bang it goes

Everybody should have a documentary made about themselves. It's amazing what you see and what you learn.

Write. Write every day. Write honestly. Write something that doesn’t exist, and you wish did. Read. Learn. Study. Watch people. Listen to what they say, listen to how they say it and listen to what they do not say. Surprise yourself. Scare yourself.

Reading makes me want to write my own books, and just trying to understand what I see in the world around me makes me want to figure things out.