Top 160 Carlo Rovelli Quotes (2026 Update)
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101. “In quantum mechanics no object has a definite position, except when colliding headlong with something else.”

— Carlo Rovelli

102. “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

103. “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

104. “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

105. “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

106. “Genius hesitates.”

— Carlo Rovelli

107. “Those who criticize the usefulness of philosophy for science, Aristotle has noticed, are not doing science: they are doing philosophy.”

— Carlo Rovelli

108. “Clues put us on the right path toward a correct theory. Strong evidence is that which subsequently allows us to trust whether the theory we have built is a good one or not. Without.”

— Carlo Rovelli

109. “The entropy of a system depends explicitly on blurring. It depends on what I do not register, because it depends on the number of indistinguishable configurations. The same microscopic configuration may be of high entropy with regard to one blurring and of low in relation to another.”

— Carlo Rovelli

110. “If things fall, it is due to this slowing down of time. Where time passes uniformly, in interplanetary space, things do not fall. They float, without falling. Here on the surface of our planet, on the other hand, the movement of things inclines naturally toward where time passes more slowly, as when we run down the beach into the sea and the resistance of the water on our legs makes us fall headfirst into the waves. Things fall downward because, down there, time is slowed by the Earth.”

— Carlo Rovelli

111. “Science is not reliable because it provides certainty. It is reliable because it provides us with the best answers we have at present. Science is the most we know so far about the problems confronting us. It is precisely its openness, the fact that it constantly calls current knowledge into question, which guarantees that the answers it offers are the best so far available: if you find better answers, these new answers become science.”

— Carlo Rovelli

112. “We are perhaps the only species on Earth to be conscious of the inevitability of our individual mortality. 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

113. “Things” in themselves are only events that for a while are monotonous.”

— Carlo Rovelli

114. “The world is complex, and we capture it with different languages, each appropriate to the process that we are describing.”

— Carlo Rovelli

115. “To ask oneself in general what exists or what is real means only to ask how would you like to use a verb and an adjective; it’s a grammatical question, not a question about nature. Nature, for its part, is what it is, and we discover it very gradually. If our grammar and our intuition do not readily adapt to what we discover, well, too bad. We must seek to adapt them.”

— Carlo Rovelli

116. “Science is born from this act of humility: not trusting blindly in our past knowledge and our intuition. Not believing what everyone says. Not having faith in the accumulated knowledge of our fathers and grandfathers. We learn nothing if we think that we already know the essentials, if we assume that they were written in a book or known by the elders of the tribe. The centuries in which people had faith in what they believed were the centuries in which little new was learned.”

— Carlo Rovelli

117. “A moving object therefore experiences a shorter duration than a stationary one: a watch marks fewer seconds, a plant grows more slowly, a young man dreams less. For a moving object, time contracts.”

— Carlo Rovelli

118. “To trust immediate intuitions rather than collective examination that is rational, careful, and intelligent is not wisdom: it is the presumption of an old man who refuses to believe that the great world outside his village is any different from the one that he has always known. As.”

— Carlo Rovelli

119. “What are we, in this boundless and glowing world?”

— Carlo Rovelli

120. “What counts is not the pen used for writing but the poetry that is written. The reason we take interest in an automobile engine is not because it makes wheels turn; it is because it takes us places that we could not reach by foot. The turning wheels are just the mechanism of an instrument that allows us to journey.”

— Carlo Rovelli

121. “And it seems to me that life, this brief life, is nothing other than this: the incessant cry of these emotions that drive us, that we sometimes attempt to channel in the name of a god, a political faith, in a ritual that reassures us that, fundamentally, everything is in order, in a great and boundless love – and the cry is beautiful. Sometimes it is a cry of pain. Sometimes it is a song.”

— Carlo Rovelli

122. “The most credible answers are the ones given by science, because science IS the search for the most credible answers available, not for answers pretending to certainty.”

— Carlo Rovelli

123. “Being aware that we may be wrong is different from claiming that it is senseless to speak of right and wrong. Recognizing diversity and taking seriously ideas that diverge from our own is different from claiming that all ideas are equally worthy. Knowing that a given judgment is born within a complex cultural context and is related to many others does not necessarily imply that we are unable to recognize it is wrong.”

— Carlo Rovelli

124. “Is the daily spectacle of a revolving universe “illusory”? No, it is real, but it doesn’t involve the cosmos alone. It involves our relation with the sun and the stars. We understand it by asking ourselves how we move. Cosmic movement emerges from the relation between the cosmos and ourselves.”

— Carlo Rovelli

125. “In the awareness that we can always be wrong, and therefore ready at any moment to change direction if a new track appears; but knowing also that if we are good enough we will get it right and will find what we are seeking. This is the nature of science. The.”

— Carlo Rovelli

126. “We are like an only child who in growing up realizes that the world does not revolve only around himself, as he thought when little. He must learn to be one among others.”

— Carlo Rovelli

127. “Children grow up and discover that the world is not as it seemed from within the four walls of their homes. Humankind as a whole does the same.”

— Carlo Rovelli

128. “We are perhaps the only species on Earth to be conscious of the inevitability of our individual mortality.”

— Carlo Rovelli

129. “Music can occur only in time, but if we are always in the present moment, how is it possible to hear it? It is possible, Augustine observes, because our consciousness is based on memory and on anticipation.”

— Carlo Rovelli

130. “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. For.”

— Carlo Rovelli

131. “It is hardly surprising that there are more things in heaven and earth, dear reader, than have been dreamed of in our philosophy – or in our physics.”

— Carlo Rovelli

132. “We inhabit time as fish live in water. Our being is being in time.”

— Carlo Rovelli

133. “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

134. “It is in order to escape this anxiety that we have imagined the existence of “eternity,” a strange world outside of time that we would like to be inhabited by gods, by a God, or by immortal souls.”

— Carlo Rovelli

135. “The world is like a collection of interrelated points of view.”

— Carlo Rovelli

136. “What I see, in other words, is not a reproduction of the external world. It is what I expect, corrected by what I can grasp. The relevant input is not that which confirms what we already know, but that which contradicts our expectations.”

— Carlo Rovelli

137. “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

138. “For a hypothetically supersensible being, there would be no “flowing” of time: the universe would be a single block of past, present, and future.”

— Carlo Rovelli

139. “We must distinguish between clues and strong evidence. Clues are what set Sherlock Holmes on the right track, allowing him to solve a mysterious case. Strong evidence is what the judge needs to sentence the guilty. Clues put us on the right path toward a correct theory. Strong evidence is that which subsequently allows us to trust whether the theory we have built is a good one or not. Without clues, we search in the wrong directions. Without evidence, a theory is not reliable.”

— Carlo Rovelli

140. “A science that closes its ears to philosophy fades into superficiality; a philosophy that pays no attention to the scientific knowledge of its time is obtuse and sterile. It betrays its own deepest roots, which are evident in the etymology of philosophy: the love of knowledge.”

— Carlo Rovelli

141. “In technical terms, we say that Einstein has understood that “absolute simultaneity” does not exist: there is no collection of events in the universe that exist “now.”

— Carlo Rovelli

142. “La precariedad de la verdad no implica que no podamos ponernos de acuerdo.”

— Carlo Rovelli

143. “The events of the world do not form an orderly queue, like the English. They crowd around chaotically, like Italians.”

— Carlo Rovelli

144. “I don’t like to thank God: I like to wake in the morning, look at the sea and thank the wind, the waves, the sky, the fragrance of plants, the life that allows me to exist, the sun that rises.”

— Carlo Rovelli

145. “The discovery of quantum theory, I believe, is the discovery that the properties of any entity are nothing other than the way in which that entity influences others. It exists only through its interactions. Quantum theory is the theory of how things influence each other. And this is the best description of nature that we have.54.”

— Carlo Rovelli

146. “National identity is a con. It’s good for overcoming local interests for the common good, but it is short-sighted and counterproductive when it promotes the interests of a totally artificial group – ‘our nation’ – above a more ample sense of what the common good consists of.”

— Carlo Rovelli

147. “Richard Feynman, who more than anyone has known how to juggle with the theory, has written: “I think I can state that nobody really understands quantum mechanics.”

— Carlo Rovelli

148. “Newton’s mechanics, Maxwell’s equations, quantum mechanics, and so on, tell us how events happen, not how things are.”

— Carlo Rovelli

149. “We were in our twenties, and life at that age is frequently wonderful, and our experience of it heightened – especially in our memory of it. This is not the fragrance of history, it is the fragrance of youth. For me those events remain remarkable, even magical, but precisely due to the fact that they were the beginning of something. A path opened up for me. The life that followed was not greyer: I was part of a collective discovery of a spectrum of colour, and those colours have stayed with me.”

— Carlo Rovelli

150. “We long for timelessness, we endure the passing of time: we suffer time. Time is suffering.”

— Carlo Rovelli