Top 160 Carlo Rovelli Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “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

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

— Carlo Rovelli

103. “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

104. “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

105. “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

106. “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

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

— Carlo Rovelli

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

— Carlo Rovelli

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

— Carlo Rovelli

110. “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

111. “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

112. “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

113. “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

114. “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

115. “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

116. “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

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

— Carlo Rovelli

118. “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

119. “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

120. “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

121. “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

122. “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

123. “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

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

— Carlo Rovelli

125. “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

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

— Carlo Rovelli

127. “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

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

— Carlo Rovelli

129. “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

130. “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

131. “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

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

— Carlo Rovelli

133. “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

134. “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

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

— Carlo Rovelli

136. “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

137. “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

138. “You don’t get anywhere by not ‘wasting’ time – something, unfortunately, which the parents of teenagers tend frequently to forget.”

— Carlo Rovelli

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

— Carlo Rovelli

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

— Carlo Rovelli

141. “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

142. “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

143. “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

144. “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

145. “The quanta of gravity, that is, are not in space; they are themselves space. The.”

— Carlo Rovelli

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

— Carlo Rovelli

147. “Scientists are not immune from talking nonsense.”

— Carlo Rovelli

148. “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

149. “The reason behind the need to dominate others derives from a terror of being dominated by them.”

— Carlo Rovelli

150. “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