Top 120 Brian Greene Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “Understanding requires insight. Insight must be anchored.”

— Brian Greene

52. “When general relativity was first put forward in 1915, the math was very unfamiliar to most physicists. Now we teach general relativity to advanced high school students.”

— Brian Greene

53. “Before the discovery of quantum mechanics, the framework of physics was this: If you tell me how things are now, I can then use the laws of physics to calculate, and hence predict, how things will be later.”

— Brian Greene

54. “A watch worn by a particle of light would not tick at all. Light realizes the dreams of Ponce de Leon and the cosmetics industry: it doesn’t age.”

— Brian Greene

55. “How can a speck of a universe be physically identical to the great expanse we view in the heavens above?”

— Brian Greene

56. “But, as Einstein once said, “For we convinced physicists, the distinction between past, present, and future is only an illusion, however persistent.”5.”

— Brian Greene

57. “I believe that through its rational evaluation of truth and indifference to personal belief, science transcends religious and political divisions and so does bind us into a greater, more resilient whole.”

— Brian Greene

58. “A tree is to the entire universe as a string is to an atom.”

— Brian Greene

59. “I would say in one sentence my goal is to at least be part of the journey to find the unified theory that Einstein himself was really the first to look for.”

— Brian Greene

60. “The universe is incredibly wondrous, incredibly beautiful, and it fills me with a sense that there is some underlying explanation that we have yet to fully understand. If someone wants to place the word ‘God’ on those collections of words, it’s OK with me.”

— Brian Greene

61. “The pinpoints of starlight we see with the naked eye are photons that have been streaming toward us for a few years or a few thousand.”

— Brian Greene

62. “I have long thought that anyone who does not regularly – or ever – gaze up and see the wonder and glory of a dark night sky filled with countless stars loses a sense of their fundamental connectedness to the universe.”

— Brian Greene

63. “I think the relationship between memory and time is a very deep and tricky one, to tell you the truth. I don’t consider memory another sense. I do consider memory that which allows us to think that time flows.”

— Brian Greene

64. “Assessing existence while failing to embrace the insights of modern physics would be like wrestling in the dark with an unknown opponent.”

— Brian Greene

65. “I’ve spent something like 17 years working on a theory for which there is essentially no direct experimental support.”

— Brian Greene

66. “We can certainly go further than cats, but why should it be that our brains are somehow so suited to the universe that our brains will be able to understand the deepest workings?”

— Brian Greene

67. “When you realize that quantum mechanics underlies all physical processes, from the fusing of atoms in the sun to the neural firings that constitutes the stuff of thought, the far-reaching implications of the proposal become apparent. It says that there’s no such thing as a road untraveled. Yet each such road – each reality – is hidden from all others.”

— Brian Greene

68. “The melded nature of space and time is intimately woven with properties of light speed. The inviolable nature of the speed of light is actually, in Einstein’s hands, talking about the inviolable nature of cause and effect.”

— Brian Greene

69. “According to inflation, the more than 100 billion galaxies, sparkling throughout space like heavenly diamonds, are nothing but quantum mechanics writ large across the sky. To me, this realization is one of the greatest wonders of the modern scientific age.”

— Brian Greene

70. “The revelation we’ve come to is that we can trust our memories of a past with lower, not higher, entropy only if the big bang – the process, event, or happening that brought the universe into existence – started off the universe in an extraordinarily special, highly ordered state of low entropy.”

— Brian Greene

71. “In my own research when I’m working with equations, I never feel like I really understand what I’m doing if I’m solely relying on the mathematics for my understanding. I need to have a visual picture in my mind. I’m constantly translating from the math to some intuitive mind’s-eye picture.”

— Brian Greene

72. “I believe we owe our young an education that captures the exhilarating drama of science.”

— Brian Greene

73. “Much as Hamlet famously declares, “I could be bounded in a nutshell, and count myself a king of infinite space,” each of the bubble universes appears to have finite spatial extent when examined from the outside, but infinite spatial extent when examined from the inside. And that’s a marvelous realization.”

— Brian Greene

74. “There’s a picture of my dorm room in the college yearbook as the most messy, most disgusting room on the Harvard campus, where I was an undergraduate.”

— Brian Greene

75. “I wouldn’t say that ‘The Fabric of the Cosmos’ is a book on cosmology. Cosmology certainly plays a big part, but the major theme is our ever-evolving understanding of space and time, and what it all means for our sense of reality.”

— Brian Greene

76. “In the end, during our brief moment in the sun, we are tasked with the noble charge of finding our own meaning.”

— Brian Greene

77. “Extraordinary emblems of math’s ability to illuminate the dark corners of the cosmos, black holes have become the cynosures of modern physics.”

— Brian Greene

78. “To tell you the truth, I’ve never met anybody who can envision more than three dimensions. There are some who claim they can, and maybe they can; it’s hard to say.”

— Brian Greene

79. “So: if you buy the notion that reality consists of the things in your freeze-frame mental image right now, and if you agree that your now is no more valid than the now of someone located far away in space who can move freely, then reality encompasses all of the events in spacetime.”

— Brian Greene

80. “The ability to manipulate the environment thoughtfully provides the capacity to shift our vantage point, to hover above the timeline and contemplate what was and imagine what will be.”

— Brian Greene

81. “For string theory to make sense, the universe should have nine spacial dimensions and one time dimension, for a total of ten dimensions.”

— Brian Greene

82. “I can’t stand clutter. I can’t stand piles of stuff. And whenever I see it, I basically just throw the stuff away.”

— Brian Greene

83. “Falsifiability for a theory is great, but a theory can still be respectable even if it is not falsifiable, as long as it is verifiable.”

— Brian Greene

84. “I may be a Jewish scientist, but I would be tickled silly if one day I were reincarnated as a Baptist preacher.”

— Brian Greene

85. “Black holes, we all know, are these regions where if an object falls in, it can’t get out, but the puzzle that many struggled with over the decades is, what happens to the information that an object contains when it falls into a black hole. Is it simply lost?”

— Brian Greene

86. “In any finite region of space, matter can only arrange itself in a finite number of configurations, just as a deck of cards can be arranged in only finitely many different orders. If you shuffle the deck infinitely many times, the card orderings must necessarily repeat.”

— Brian Greene

87. “Quantum mechanics challenges this view by revealing, at least in certain circumstances, a capacity to transcend space; long-range quantum connections can bypass spatial separation. Two objects can be far apart in space, but as far as quantum mechanics is concerned, it’s as if they’re a single entity.”

— Brian Greene

88. “We revere the absolute but are bound to the transitory.”

— Brian Greene

89. “I’d say many features of string theory don’t mesh with what we observe in everyday life.”

— Brian Greene

90. “The absolute worst thing that you ever can do, in my opinion, in bringing science to the general public, is be condescending or judgmental. It is so opposite to the way science needs to be brought forth.”

— Brian Greene

91. “I like ‘The Simpsons’ quite a lot. I love the irreverent character of the whole show. It’s great.”

— Brian Greene

92. “I can assure you that no string theorist would be interested in working on string theory if it were somehow permanently beyond testability. That would no longer be doing science.”

— Brian Greene

93. “Stephen Hawking showed mathematically that the entropy of a black hole equals the number of Planck-sized cells that it takes to cover its event horizon. It’s as if each cell carries one bit, one basic unit of information.”

— Brian Greene

94. “The real question is whether all your pondering and analyses will convince you that life is worth living. That’s what it all comes down to.”

— Brian Greene

95. “Most scientists like to operate in the context of economy. If you don’t need an explanatory principle, don’t invoke it.”

— Brian Greene

96. “I like to think that Einstein would look at string theory’s journey and smile, enjoying the theory’s remarkable geometrical features while feeling kinship with fellow travelers on the long and winding road toward unification.”

— Brian Greene

97. “You should never be surprised by or feel the need to explain why any physical system is in a high entropy state.”

— Brian Greene

98. “And since, according to the big bang theory, the bang is what is supposed to have happened at the beginning, the big bang leaves out the bang. It tells us nothing about what banged, why it banged, how it banged, or, frankly, whether it ever really banged at all.”

— Brian Greene

99. “I’ve had various experiences where I’ve been called by Hollywood studios to look at a script or comment on various scientific ideas that they’re trying to inject into a story.”

— Brian Greene

100. “Just as important, the energy released by the inflaton field isn’t lost-instead, like a cooling vat of steam condensing into water droplets, the inflaton’s energy condenses into a uniform bath of particles that fill space. This two-step process-brief but rapid expansion, followed by energy conversion to particles-results in a huge, uniform spatial expanse that’s filled with the raw material of familiar structures like stars and galaxies.”

— Brian Greene