Top 60 Leonard Mlodinow Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Nonverbal communication forms a social language that is in many ways richer and more fundamental than our words.”

— Leonard Mlodinow

2. “Regression toward the mean. That is, in any series of random events an extraordinary event is most likely to be followed, due purely to chance, by a more ordinary one.”

— Leonard Mlodinow

3. “A failure doesn’t mean you are unworthy, nor does it preclude success on the next try.”

— Leonard Mlodinow

4. “Social rejection doesn’t just cause emotional pain; it affects our physical being.”

— Leonard Mlodinow

5. “One thing that feeds into the way you experience the social world is your mood – and one thing that affects your mood is the weather.”

— Leonard Mlodinow

6. “What I’ve learned, above all, is to keep marching forward because the best news is that since chance does play a role, one important factor in success is under our control: the number of at bats, the number of chances taken, the number of opportunities seized.”

— Leonard Mlodinow

7. “The normal distribution describes the manner in which many phenomena vary around a central value that represents their most probable outcome;.”

— Leonard Mlodinow

8. “Subliminal is about how we misinterpret our behavior because were unaware of what our unconscious minds are doing.”

— Leonard Mlodinow

9. “Research suggests when it comes to understanding our feelings, we humans have an odd mix of low ability and high confidence.”

— Leonard Mlodinow

10. “A dwarf standing on the shoulders of a giant may see farther than a giant himself.”

— Leonard Mlodinow

11. “That’s why successful people in every field are almost universally members of a certain set – the set of people who don’t give up.”

— Leonard Mlodinow

12. “Michael Jordan once said, “I’ve missed more than nine thousand shots in my career. I’ve lost almost three hundred games. Twenty-six times, I’ve been trusted to take the game-winning shot and missed. I failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.”

— Leonard Mlodinow

13. “We judge people and initiatives by their results, and we expect events to happen for good, understandable reason. But our clear visions of inevitability are often only illusions.”

— Leonard Mlodinow

14. “Leipzig that the university had to pass a rule against throwing stones at professors.”

— Leonard Mlodinow

15. “Pauli turned to the audience and argued, “Yes, my theory is crazy enough!” Then Bohr insisted, “No, your theory is not crazy enough!”

— Leonard Mlodinow

16. “We believe that when we choose anything, judge a stranger and even fall in love, we understand the principal factors that influenced us. Very often nothing could be further from the truth. As a result, many of our most basic assumptions about ourselves, and society, are false.”

— Leonard Mlodinow

17. “A dwarf on a giant’s shoulders sees farther of the two.”

— Leonard Mlodinow

18. “One end of the spectrum of fantastical thinking is labeled “crackpot,” and the other “visionary.”

— Leonard Mlodinow

19. “Science has revealed a universe that is vast, ancient, violent, strange, and beautiful, a universe of almost infinite variety and possibility one in which time can end in a black hole, and conscious beings can evolve from a soup of minerals.”

— Leonard Mlodinow

20. “As the psychologist Jonathan Haidt put it, there are two ways to get at the truth: the way of the scientist and the way of the lawyer.”

— Leonard Mlodinow

21. “Deep concentration causes the energy consumption in your brain to go up by only about 1 percent. No matter what you are doing with your conscious mind, it is your unconscious that dominates your mental activity – and therefore uses up most of the energy consumed by the brain. Regardless of whether your conscious mind is idle or engaged, your unconscious mind is hard at work doing the mental equivalent of push-ups, squats, and wind sprints. O.”

— Leonard Mlodinow

22. “What can you prove about space? How do you know where you are? Can space be curved? How many dimensions are there? How does geometry explain the natural order and unity of the cosmos? These are the questions behind the five geometric revolutions of world history. It started with a little scheme hatched by Pythagoras: to employ mathematics as the abstract system of rules that can model the physical universe.”

— Leonard Mlodinow

23. “Well, I have been working on my own theory for twelve years,” and then he proceeded to describe it in excruciating detail. When he was finished, Feynman turned to me and said, in front of the man who had just proudly described his work, “That’s exactly what I mean about wasting your time.”

— Leonard Mlodinow

24. “It all began when the Beagle’s previous captain, Pringle Stokes, shot himself in the head and, after the bullet didn’t kill him, died of gangrene.”

— Leonard Mlodinow

25. “Today we call our subspecies Homo sapiens sapiens, or “Wise, Wise Man.”

— Leonard Mlodinow

26. “I wouldn’t have to drop out of academia and take a more lucrative position waiting tables at the faculty club.”

— Leonard Mlodinow

27. “Einstein, who was then a professor in Berlin, was by chance visiting Caltech in the United States the day Hitler was appointed.”

— Leonard Mlodinow

28. “There is therefore a fundamental clash between our need to feel we are in control and our ability to recognize randomness.”

— Leonard Mlodinow

29. “We miss the effects of randomness in life because when we assess the world, we tend to see what we expect to see. We in effect define degree of talent by degree of success and then reinforce our feelings of causality by noting the correlation. That’s why although there is sometimes little difference in ability between a wildly successful person and one who is not as successful, there is usually a big difference in how they are viewed.”

— Leonard Mlodinow

30. “In particular, what seems special about humans is our desire and ability to understand what other people think and feel. Called “theory of mind,” or “ToM,” this ability gives humans a remarkable power to make sense of other people’s past behavior and to predict how their behavior will unfold given their present or future circumstances.”

— Leonard Mlodinow

31. “Paleolithic humans migrated often, and, like my teenagers, they followed the food.”

— Leonard Mlodinow

32. “Listeners instinctively detect that when we lower the usual pitch of our voice, we are sad, and when we raise it, we are angry or fearful.”

— Leonard Mlodinow

33. “My father had drawn number 3,004 in a death lottery in which German precision trumped Nazi brutality.”

— Leonard Mlodinow

34. “I have stressed this distinction because it is an important one. It defines the fundamental difference between probability and statistics: the former concerns predictions based on fixed probabilities; the latter concerns the inference of those probabilities based on observed data.”

— Leonard Mlodinow

35. “If someone were to ask about your taste in fine dining and you were to say, “I lean toward food served with vivid adjectives,” you’d probably get a pretty strange look;.”

— Leonard Mlodinow

36. “Instead, like Heisenberg, his priority seemed to be to preserve as much of German science as possible, while complying with all Nazi laws and regulations.”

— Leonard Mlodinow

37. “They required three thousand Jews, the man said, and the line had apparently held 3,004.”

— Leonard Mlodinow

38. “People seemed to “decide” how much to eat based on box size as much as taste.”

— Leonard Mlodinow

39. “When a teacher initially believes that one student is smarter than another, he selectively focuses on evidence that tends to confirm the hypothesis.”

— Leonard Mlodinow

40. “Born, barred from teaching and worried about the ongoing harassment of his children, also immediately sought to leave Germany.”

— Leonard Mlodinow

41. “The appeal of many conspiracy theories depends on the misunderstanding of this logic. That is, it depends on confusing the probability that a series of events would happen if it were the product of a huge conspiracy with the probability that a huge conspiracy exists if a series of events occurs.”

— Leonard Mlodinow

42. “Stephen Hawking once told me that there was a sense in which he was glad to be paralyzed, because it allowed him to focus much more intensely on his work.”

— Leonard Mlodinow

43. “Upon learning of the young man’s interest in a physics book, Lindemann, a number theorist, abruptly ended the interview, saying, “In that case you are completely lost to mathematics.”

— Leonard Mlodinow

44. “Chemicals were easier to procure than friends, and when I wanted to play with them they never said they had to stay home to wash their hair or, less politely, that they didn’t associate with weirdos.”

— Leonard Mlodinow

45. “Not too long ago, the man who was then the president of Iran was quoted as saying that Jews descended from monkeys and pigs.”

— Leonard Mlodinow

46. “One morning during Lent in 415, Hypatia climbed into her chariot, some say outside her residence, some say on a street intending to ride home. Several hundred of Cyril’s stooges, Christian monks from a desert monastery, swooped upon her, beat her, and dragged her to a church. Inside the church they stripped her naked and peeled away her flesh with either sharpened tiles or broken bits of pottery.”

— Leonard Mlodinow

47. “In 1932, after nineteen years of research, Bartlett published his results.”

— Leonard Mlodinow

48. “Pythagoras was a charismatic figure and a genius, but he was also a good self-promoter. In Egypt, he not only learned Egyptian geometry but became the first Greek to learn Egyptian hieroglyphics, and eventually became an Egyptian priest, or the equivalent, initiated into their sacred rites. This gave him access to all their mysteries, even to the secret rooms in their temples.”

— Leonard Mlodinow

49. “The Nazis confiscated his personal property, burned his works on relativity, and put a five-thousand-dollar bounty on his head.”

— Leonard Mlodinow

50. “Today we know that there are other solar systems only tens of light years away. Had the Golden Age continued unabated, we might by now have sent probes exploring them. We might have landed on the moon in the year 969 instead of 1969. We might have an understanding of space and life that is unimaginable to us today. Instead, events occurred that would delay the progress begun by the Greeks by a millennium.”

— Leonard Mlodinow