Top 160 Carlo Rovelli Quotes (2026 Update)
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51. “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

52. “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

53. “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

54. “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

55. “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

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

— Carlo Rovelli

57. “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

58. “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

59. “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

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

— Carlo Rovelli

61. “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

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

— Carlo Rovelli

63. “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

64. “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

65. “What opens our minds and shows the limits of our ideas is an encounter with other people, other cultures, other ideas.”

— Carlo Rovelli

66. “There is not an “I” and “the neurons in my brain.” They are the same thing.”

— Carlo Rovelli

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

— Carlo Rovelli

68. “There is a feeling of deep universalism, in the wake of the splendid words of Democritus: “To a wise man, the whole earth is open, because the true country of a virtuous soul is the entire universe.”

— Carlo Rovelli

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

— Carlo Rovelli

70. “Let’s begin with a simple fact: time passes faster in the mountains than it does at sea level.”

— Carlo Rovelli

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

— Carlo Rovelli

72. “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

73. “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

74. “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

75. “A stone is a prototypical “thing”: we can ask ourselves where it will be tomorrow. Conversely, a kiss is an “event.” It makes no sense to ask where the kiss will be tomorrow. The world is made up of networks of kisses, not of stones.”

— Carlo Rovelli

76. “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

77. “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

78. “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

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

— Carlo Rovelli

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

— Carlo Rovelli

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

— Carlo Rovelli

82. “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

83. “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

84. “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

85. “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

86. “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

87. “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

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

— Carlo Rovelli

89. “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

90. “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

91. “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

92. “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

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

— Carlo Rovelli

94. “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

95. “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

96. “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

97. “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

98. “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

99. “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

100. “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