Top 160 Carlo Rovelli Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “We have a hundred billion neurons in our brains, as many as there are stars in a galaxy, with an even more astronomical number of links and potential combinations through which they can interact. We are not conscious of all of this. “We” are the process formed by this entire intricacy, not just by the little of it of which we are conscious.”

— Carlo Rovelli

52. “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

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

— Carlo Rovelli

54. “An elementary structure of the world is emerging, generated by a swarm of quantum events, where time and space do not exist. Quantum fields draw together space, time, matter, and light, exchanging information between one event and another. Reality is a network of granular events; the dynamic that connects them is probabilistic; between one event and another, space, time, matter, and energy melt into a cloud of probability.”

— Carlo Rovelli

55. “Those who defend this way of thinking about reality – eternalism – frequently cite Einstein, who in a famous letter writes: For people like us who believe in physics the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.”

— Carlo Rovelli

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

— Carlo Rovelli

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

— Carlo Rovelli

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

— Carlo Rovelli

59. “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

60. “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

61. “I believe that our species will not last long. It does not seem to be made of the stuff that has allowed the turtle, for example, to continue to exist more or less unchanged for hundreds of millions of years, for hundreds of times longer, that is, than we have even been in existence. We belong to a short-lived genus of species. All of our cousins are already extinct. What’s more, we do damage. The brutal climate and environmental changes that we have triggered are unlikely to spare us.”

— Carlo Rovelli

62. “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

63. “Every cubic centimeter of space, and every second that passes, is the result of this dancing foam of extremely small quanta.”

— Carlo Rovelli

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

— Carlo Rovelli

65. “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

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

— Carlo Rovelli

67. “When we say that human behaviour is unpredictable, we are right, because it is too complex to be predicted, especially by ourselves. Our intense sensation of internal liberty, as Spinoza acutely saw, comes from the fact that the ideas and images which we have of ourselves are much cruder and sketchier than the detailed complexity of what is happening within us. We are the source of amazement in our own eyes.”

— Carlo Rovelli

68. “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

69. “Wonder is the source of our desire for knowledge,1 and the discovery that time is not what we thought it was opens up a thousand questions.”

— Carlo Rovelli

70. “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

71. “It is with sadness that every so often I spend a few hours on the internet, reading or listening to the mountain of stupidity dressed up with the word “quantum.”

— Carlo Rovelli

72. “The world is strange, but simple.”

— Carlo Rovelli

73. “The search for knowledge is not nourished by certainty: it is nourished by a radical absence of certainty.”

— Carlo Rovelli

74. “Heisenberg had understood that you can’t locate a particle at a point in space for long: it soon escapes. The smaller the region where we try to locate a particle, the greater the velocity at which it escapes.”

— Carlo Rovelli

75. “The granular discrete structure of space resolves the difficulties of the quantum theory of fields, eliminating the infinities by which it is afflicted.”

— Carlo Rovelli

76. “There is no preferred direction of time without heat.”

— Carlo Rovelli

77. “And it is at this point that an extraordinary idea occurred to him, a stroke of pure genius: the gravitational field is not diffused through space; the gravitational field is that space itself. This is the idea of the general theory of relativity. Newton’s “space,” through which things move, and the “gravitational field” are one and the same thing.”

— Carlo Rovelli

78. “I want a theory of physics that accounts for the structure of the universe, that clarifies what it is to be an observer in the universe, not a theory that makes the universe depend on me observing it.”

— Carlo Rovelli

79. “There is no “truer” time; there are two times and they change relative to each other. Neither is truer than the other. But there are not just two times. Times are legion: a different one for every point in space. There is not one single time; there is a vast multitude of them.”

— Carlo Rovelli

80. “All of this, I believe, indicates that in order to grasp the basic grammar of the world, we need to merge three basic ingredients, not just two: not just general relativity and quantum mechanics, but also the theory of heat, that is, statistical mechanics and thermodynamics, which we can also describe as “information theory.”

— Carlo Rovelli

81. “In his youth Albert Einstein spent a year loafing aimlessly. You don’t get anywhere by not ‘wasting’ time- something, unfortunately, that the parents of teenagers tend frequently to forget.”

— Carlo Rovelli

82. “Science is about reading the world from a gradually widening point of view.”

— Carlo Rovelli

83. “I do not fear death. I fear suffering. And I fear old age, though less so now that I am witnessing the tranquil and pleasant old age of my father. I am afraid of frailty, and of the absence of love. But death does not alarm me. It did not scare me when I was young, and I thought at the time that this was because it was such a remote prospect. But now, at sixty, the fear has yet to arrive. I love life, but life is also struggle, suffering, pain. I think of death as akin to a well-earned rest.”

— Carlo Rovelli

84. “But it isn’t absence that causes sorrow. It is affection and love. Without affection, without love, such absences would cause us no pain. For this reason, even the pain caused by absence is, in the end, something good and even beautiful, because it feeds on that which gives meaning to life.”

— Carlo Rovelli

85. “I believe that this example demonstrates how great science and great poetry are both visionary, and may even arrive at the same intuitions. Our culture is foolish to keep science and poetry separated: they are two tools to open our eyes to the complexity and beauty of the world.”

— Carlo Rovelli

86. “The entropy of the world in the far past appears very low to us. But this might not reflect the exact state of the world: it might regard the subset of the world’ s variables with which we, as physical systems, have interacted. It is with respect to the dramatic blurring produced by our interactions with the world, caused by the small set of macroscopic variables in terms of which we describe the world, that the entropy of the universe was low.”

— Carlo Rovelli

87. “The ability to understand something before it’s observed is at the heart of scientific thinking.”

— Carlo Rovelli

88. “The border is porous. Myths nourish science, and science nourishes myth. But the value of knowledge remains. If we find the antelope, we can eat.”

— Carlo Rovelli

89. “People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction made between past, present and future is nothing more than a persistent, stubborn illusion.” Illusion.”

— Carlo Rovelli

90. “If I ask whether two events – one on Earth and the other on Proxima b – are happening “at the same moment,” the correct answer would be: “It’s a question that doesn’t make sense, because there is no such thing as ‘the same moment’ definable in the universe.” The “present of the universe” is meaningless.”

— Carlo Rovelli

91. “Quantum mechanics extends this relativity in a radical way: all variable aspects of an object exist only in relation to other objects. It is only in interactions that nature draws the world.”

— Carlo Rovelli

92. “Nature is behaving with us like that elderly rabbi to whom two men went in order to settle a dispute. Having listened to the first, the rabbi says: “You are in the right.” The second insists on being heard. The rabbi listens to him and says: “You’re also right.” Having overheard from the next room, the rabbi’s wife then calls out, “But they can’t both be in the right!” The rabbi reflects and nods before concluding: “And you’re right too.” A.”

— Carlo Rovelli

93. “In quantum mechanics no object has a definite position, except when colliding headlong with something else.”

— Carlo Rovelli

94. “Science is a continual exploration of ways of thinking. Its strength is its visionary capacity to demolish preconceived ideas, to reveal new regions of reality, and to construct new and more effective images of the world. This adventure rests upon the entirety of past knowledge, but at its heart is change.”

— Carlo Rovelli

95. “When Einstein died, his greatest rival, Bohr, found for him words of moving admiration. When a few years later Bohr in turn died, someone took a photograph of the blackboard in his study. There’s a drawing on it. A drawing of the ‘light-filled box’ in Einstein’s thought experiment. To the very last, the desire to challenge oneself and understand more. And to the very last: doubt.”

— Carlo Rovelli

96. “Temporality is profoundly linked to blurring. The blurring is due to the fact that we are ignorant of the microscopic details of the world. The time of physics is, ultimately, the expression of our ignorance of the world. Time is ignorance.”

— Carlo Rovelli

97. “A university student attending lectures on general relativity i the morning and others on quantum mechanics in the afternoon might be forgiven for thinking that his professors are fools, or have neglected to communicate with each other for at least a century.”

— Carlo Rovelli

98. “Genius hesitates.”

— Carlo Rovelli

99. “Poetry and science are both manifestations of the spirit that creates new ways of thinking the world, in order to understand it better. Great science and great poetry are both visionary, and sometimes may arrive at the same insights. The culture of today that keeps science and poetry so far apart is essentially foolish, to my way of thinking, because it makes us less able to see the complexity and the beauty of the world as revealed by both.”

— Carlo Rovelli

100. “Quantum mechanics and experiments with particles have taught us that the world is a continuous, restless swarming of things, a continuous coming to light and disappearance of ephemeral entities. A set of vibrations, as in the switched-on hippie world of the 1960s. A world of happenings, not of things. The.”

— Carlo Rovelli