Top 160 Carlo Rovelli Quotes (2024 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. “I worry that free imagination is overvalued, and I think this carries risks.”

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

— Carlo Rovelli

9. “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

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

— Carlo Rovelli

11. “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

12. “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

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

— Carlo Rovelli

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

— Carlo Rovelli

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

— Carlo Rovelli

16. “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

17. “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

18. “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

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

— Carlo Rovelli

20. “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

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. “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

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

— Carlo Rovelli

24. “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

25. “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

26. “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

27. “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

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

— Carlo Rovelli

29. “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

30. “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

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

— Carlo Rovelli

32. “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

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

— Carlo Rovelli

34. “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

35. “Life on Earth gives only a small taste of what can happen in the universe.”

— Carlo Rovelli

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

— Carlo Rovelli

37. “An individual is a process: complex, tightly integrated.”

— Carlo Rovelli

38. “Time is information we don’t have. Time is our ignorance.”

— Carlo Rovelli

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

— Carlo Rovelli

40. “Within the immense ocean of galaxies and stars we are in a remote corner; amidst the infinite arabesques of forms which constitute reality we are merely a flourish among innumerably many such flourishes.”

— Carlo Rovelli

41. “Once again, the world seems to be less about objects than about interactive relationships.”

— Carlo Rovelli

42. “Before Newton, time for humanity was the way of counting how things changed. Before him, no one had thought it possible that a time independent of things could exist. Don’t take your intuitions and ideas to be ‘natural’: they are often the products of the ideas of audacious thinkers who came before us.”

— Carlo Rovelli

43. “There are frontiers where we are learning, and our desire for knowledge burns. They are in the most minute reaches of the fabric of space, at the origins of the cosmos, in the nature of time, in the phenomenon of black holes, and in the workings of our own thought processes. Here, on the edge of what we know, in contact with the ocean of the unknown, shines the mystery and the beauty of the world. And it’s breathtaking.”

— Carlo Rovelli

44. “All things are continually interacting with each other, and in doing so each bears the traces of that with which it has interacted: and in this sense all things continuously exchange information about each other.”

— Carlo Rovelli

45. “We understand the world in its becoming, not in its being.”

— Carlo Rovelli

46. “I fear that soon we shall also have to become the only species that will knowingly watch the coming of its own collective demise, or at least the demise of its civilization.”

— Carlo Rovelli

47. “It is not against nature to be curious: it is our nature to be so.”

— Carlo Rovelli

48. “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

49. “Bertrand Russell describes the same idea thus: “the raw material out of which the world is built up is not of two sorts, one matter and the other mind; it is simply arranged in different patterns by its inter-relations: some arrangements may be called mental, while others may be called physical.”

— Carlo Rovelli

50. “Perhaps it is we who have not yet learned to look at it from just the right point of view, one that would reveal its hidden simplicity.”

— Carlo Rovelli