Top 160 Carlo Rovelli Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Don’t trust your teachers.”

— Carlo Rovelli

2. “I think that physics is about escaping the prison of the received thoughts and searching for novel ways of thinking the world, about trying to clear a bit the misty lake of insubstantial dreams, which reflect reality like the lake reflects the mountains.”

— Carlo Rovelli

3. “All of the sons of Adam are part of one single body, They are of the same essence. When time afflicts us with pain In one part of that body All the other parts feel it too. If you fail to feel the pain of others You do not deserve the name of man.”

— Carlo Rovelli

4. “Here, on the edge of what we know, in contact with the ocean of the unknown, shines the mystery and beauty of the world. And it’s breathtaking.”

— Carlo Rovelli

5. “I think that the resistance against Darwin is not just the difficulty of seeing the power of a spectacularly beautiful explanation: it is the fear of realizing the extraordinary power that such an explanation has in shattering rests of old world views.”

— Carlo Rovelli

6. “The world, particles, light, energy, space, and time – all of this is nothing but the manifestation of a single type of entity: covariant quantum fields.”

— Carlo Rovelli

7. “Scientific answers are not definitive: they are, almost by definition, the best ones that we have at any given time. Consider.”

— Carlo Rovelli

8. “I worry that free imagination is overvalued, and I think this carries risks.”

— Carlo Rovelli

9. “An overly pragmatic attitude is not productive on the long run.”

— Carlo Rovelli

10. “We are stories, contained within the twenty complicated centimeters behind our eyes...”

— Carlo Rovelli

11. “Electrons, quarks, photons, and gluons are the components of everything that sways in the space around us. They are the “elementary particles” studied in particle physics.”

— Carlo Rovelli

12. “Quantum mechanics reveals to us that the more we look at the detail of the world, the less constant it is. The world is not made up of tiny pebbles. It is a world of vibrations, a continuous fluctuation, a microscopic swarming of fleeting microevents.”

— Carlo Rovelli

13. “The notion of “the present” refers to things that are close to us, not to anything that is far away. Our “present” does not extend throughout the universe. It is like a bubble around us.”

— Carlo Rovelli

14. “The world is not a collection of things, it is a collection of events.”

— Carlo Rovelli

15. “Two nodes connected by a link are two nodes in proximity. They are two grains of space in contact with each other: this “touching” constructs the structure of space.”

— Carlo Rovelli

16. “Einstein’s 1905 paper came out and suddenly changed people’s thinking about space-time. We’re again in the middle of something like that. When the dust settles, time – whatever it may be – could turn out to be even stranger and more illusory than even Einstein could imagine.”

— Carlo Rovelli

17. “We can think of the world as made up of things. Of substances. Of entities. Of something that is. Or we can think of it as made up of events. Of happenings. Of processes. Of something that occurs. Something that does not last, and that undergoes continual transformation, that is not permanent in time.”

— Carlo Rovelli

18. “Life is precious to us because it is ephemeral.”

— Carlo Rovelli

19. “A precious miracle that the infinite play of combinations has unlocked for us, allowing us to exist. We may smile now. We can go back to serenely immersing ourselves in time – in our finite time – to savoring the clear intensity of every fleeting and cherished moment of the brief circle of our existence.”

— Carlo Rovelli

20. “The atoms of our body, as well, flow in and away from us. We, like waves and like all objects, are a flux of events; we are processes, for a brief time monotonous.”

— Carlo Rovelli

21. “Listening a cultivated person of today that jokes and almost boasts about his scientific ignorance, is as sad as listening a scientist that boasts about not having read any poem.”

— Carlo Rovelli

22. “Ever since we discovered that Earth is round and turns like a mad spinning-top, we have understood that reality is not as it appears to us.”

— Carlo Rovelli

23. “We are made of the same stardust of which all things are made, and when we are immersed in suffering or when we are experiencing intense joy we are being nothing other than what we can’t help but be: a part of our world.”

— Carlo Rovelli

24. “Nature is our home, and in nature we are at home. This strange, multicoloured and astonishing world which we explore – where space is granular, time does not exist, and things are nowhere – is not something that estranges us from our true selves, for this is only what our natural curiosity reveals to us about the place of our dwelling. About the stuff of which we ourselves are made.”

— Carlo Rovelli

25. “Things change only in relation to one another. At a fundamental level, there is no time.”

— Carlo Rovelli

26. “We not only learn, but we also learn to gradually change our conceptual framework and to adapt it to what we learn.”

— Carlo Rovelli

27. “For everything that moves, time passes more slowly.”

— Carlo Rovelli

28. “You don’t get to new places by following established tracks.”

— Carlo Rovelli

29. “It is entropy, not energy, that keeps stones on the ground and the world turning.”

— Carlo Rovelli

30. “The very foundation of science is to keep the door open to doubt.”

— Carlo Rovelli

31. “Human beings often cling to their certainties for fear that their opinions will be proven false. But a certainty that cannot be called into question is not a certainty. Solid certainties are those that survive questioning. In order to accept questioning as the foundation for our voyage toward knowledge, we must be humble enough to accept that today’s truth may become tomorrow’s falsehood.”

— Carlo Rovelli

32. “To the very last, the desire to challenge oneself and understand more. And to the very last: doubt.”

— Carlo Rovelli

33. “Space is created by the interaction of individual quanta of gravity.”

— Carlo Rovelli

34. “The incompleteness and the uncertainty of our knowledge, our precariousness, suspended over the abyss of the immensity of what we don’t know, does not render life meaningless: it makes it interesting and precious.”

— Carlo Rovelli

35. “Physics does not describe how things evolve “in time” but how things evolve in their own times, and how “times” evolve relative to each other.”

— Carlo Rovelli

36. “We are the products of a long selection process of chemical, biological, and cultural structures that at different levels have interacted for a long time in order to shape the funny process that we are.”

— Carlo Rovelli

37. “Color is the speed at which Faraday’s lines vibrate, and this is determined by the vibrations of the electric charges that emit light. These charges are the electrons that move inside the atoms.”

— Carlo Rovelli

38. “And there is the fact that what matters is not how things are, but rather how they interact. Spin networks are not entities; they describe the effect of space upon things. Just as an electron is in no place-is diffused in a cloud of probability in all places-space is not actually forned by a single specific spin network, but rather by a cloud of probabilities over the whole range of all possible spin networks.”

— Carlo Rovelli

39. “Quanta of space mingle with the foam of spacetime, and the structure of things is born from reciprocal information that weaves the correlations among the regions of the world.”

— Carlo Rovelli

40. “Color as we perceive it is our psychophysical reaction of the nerve signal generated by the receptors of our eyes, which distinguish electromagnetic waves of different frequencies.”

— Carlo Rovelli

41. “Aristotle is the first we are aware of to have asked himself the question “What is time?,” and he came to the following conclusion: time is the measurement of change.”

— Carlo Rovelli

42. “How long is forever?” asks Alice. “Sometimes, just one second,” replies the White Rabbit. There are dreams lasting an instant in which everything seems frozen for an eternity.”

— Carlo Rovelli

43. “We are made up of the same atoms and the same light signals as are exchanged between pine trees in the mountains and stars in the galaxies.”

— Carlo Rovelli

44. “Here, in the vanguard, beyond the borders of knowledge, science becomes even more beautiful – incandescent in the forge of nascent ideas, of intuitions, of attempts. Of roads taken and then abandoned, of enthusiasms. In the effort to imagine what has not yet been imagined. Twenty.”

— Carlo Rovelli

45. “We are all in the depths of a cave, chained by our ignorance, by our prejudices, and our weak senses reveal to us only shadows. If we try to see further, we are confused; we are unaccustomed. But we try. This is science. Scientific.”

— Carlo Rovelli

46. “It is like the point where the rainbow touches the forest. We think that we can see it – but if we go to look for it, it isn’t there.”

— Carlo Rovelli

47. “Every day countless people die, and yet those who remain live as if they were immortals.”

— Carlo Rovelli

48. “Because everything that begins must end. What causes us to suffer is not in the past or the future: it is here, now, in our memory, in our expectations. We long for timelessness, we endure the passing of time: we suffer time. Time is suffering.”

— Carlo Rovelli

49. “The heat of black holes is like the Rosetta stone of physics, written in a combination of three languages- quantum, gravitational, and thermodynamic- still awaiting decipherment in order to reveal the true nature of time.”

— Carlo Rovelli

50. “Time opens up our limited access to the world. Time, then, is the form in which we beings, whose brains are made up essentially of memory and foresight, interact with the world: it is the source of identity.”

— Carlo Rovelli