Top 50 Roger Penrose Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “I would say the universe has a purpose. It’s not there just somehow by chance.”

— Roger Penrose

2. “Intelligence cannot be present without understanding. No computer has any awareness of what it does.”

— Roger Penrose

3. “Quantum mechanics makes absolutely no sense.”

— Roger Penrose

4. “It may well be there is something else going on in the brain that we don’t have an inkling of at the moment.”

— Roger Penrose

5. “It is always the case, with mathematics, that a little direct experience of thinking over things on your own can provide a much deeper understanding than merely reading about them.”

— Roger Penrose

6. “We have a closed circle of consistency here: the laws of physics produce complex systems, and these complex systems lead to consciousness, which then produces mathematics, which can then encode in a succinct and inspiring way the very underlying laws of physics that gave rise to it.”

— Roger Penrose

7. “The basic theory in twistor theory is not to add extra dimensions.”

— Roger Penrose

8. “Understanding is, after all, what science is all about – and science is a great deal more than mindless computation.”

— Roger Penrose

9. “And these little things may not seem like much but after a while they take you off on a direction where you may be a long way off from what other people have been thinking about.”

— Roger Penrose

10. “It is hard to see how one could begin to develop a quantum-theoretical description of brain action when one might well have to regard the brain as “observing itself” all the time!”

— Roger Penrose

11. “As you say, the way string theory requires all these extra dimensions and this comes from certain consistency requirements about how string should behave and so on.”

— Roger Penrose

12. “My own view is that to understand quantum nonlocality we shall require a radical new theory. This new theory will not just be a slight modification of quantum mechanics but something as different from standard quantum mechanics as general relativity is from Newtonian gravity. It would have to be something which has a completely different conceptual framework.”

— Roger Penrose

13. “Well, I don’t know if I can comment on Kant or Hegel because I’m no real philosopher in the sense of knowing what these people have said in any detail so let me not comment on that too much.”

— Roger Penrose

14. “People think of these eureka moments and my feeling is that they tend to be little things, a little realisation and then a little realisation built on that.”

— Roger Penrose

15. “With thought comprising a non-computational element, computers can never do what we human beings can.”

— Roger Penrose

16. “I was indeed very slow as a youngster.”

— Roger Penrose

17. “Thus, Godel appears to have taken it as evident that the physical brain must itself behave computationally, but that the mind is something beyond the brain, so that the mind’s action is not constrained to behave according to the computational laws that he believed must control the physical brain’s behavior.”

— Roger Penrose

18. “I’m pretty tenacious when it comes to problems.”

— Roger Penrose

19. “Well I didn’t actually see the Matrix but I’ve seen other movies where with similar sorts of themes.”

— Roger Penrose

20. “I can at least state that my point of view entails that it is our present lack of understanding of the fundamental laws of physics that prevents us from coming to grips with the concept of ‘mind’ in physical or logical terms.”

— Roger Penrose

21. “It will be one of my purposes, in later arguments, to show that there is indeed an aspect of ‘genuine understanding’ that cannot be properly simulated in any computational way whatever. Consequently, there must indeed be a distinction between genuine intelligence and any attempt at a proper computational simulation of it.”

— Roger Penrose

22. “Some years ago, I wrote a book called the Emperor’s New Mind and that book was describing a point of view I had about consciousness and why it was not something that comes about from complicated calculations.”

— Roger Penrose

23. “Ambition, idly vain; revenge and malice swell her train.”

— Roger Penrose

24. “My own way of thinking is to ponder long and I hope deeply on problems and for a long time which I keep away for years and years and I never really let them go.”

— Roger Penrose

25. “This book is about physics and its about physics and its relationship with mathematics and how they seem to be intimately related and to what extent can you explore this relationship and trust it.”

— Roger Penrose

26. “Well, gauge theory is very fundamental to our understanding of physical forces these days. But they are also dependent on a mathematical idea, which has been around for longer than gauge theory has.”

— Roger Penrose

27. “But I think it is a serious issue to wonder about the other platonic absolutes of say beauty and morality.”

— Roger Penrose

28. “Mathematical truth is not determined arbitrarily by the rules of some ‘man-made’ formal system, but has an absolute nature, and lies beyond any such system of specifiable rules. Support for the Platonic viewpoint... was an important part of Godel’s initial motivations.”

— Roger Penrose

29. “These are deep issues, and we are yet very far from explanations. I would argue that no clear answers will come forward unless the interrelating features of all these worlds are seen to come into play. No one of these issues will be resolved in isolation from the others. I have referred to three worlds and the mysteries that relate them one to another. No doubt there are not really three worlds but one, the true nature of which we do not even glimpse at present.”

— Roger Penrose

30. “Mathematical truth is not determined arbitrarily by the rules of some ‘man-made’ formal system, but has an absolute nature, and lies beyond any such system of specifiable rules.”

— Roger Penrose

31. “If you didn’t have any conscious beings in the world, there really wouldn’t be morality but with consciousness that you have it.”

— Roger Penrose

32. “Objective mathematical notions must be thought of as timeless entities and are not to be regarded as being conjured into existence at the moment that they are first humanly perceived.”

— Roger Penrose

33. “If we try to make general inferences about the theoretical possibility of a reliable computational model of the brain, we ought indeed to come to terms with the mysteries of quantum theory.”

— Roger Penrose

34. “Awareness, I take to be one aspect-the passive aspect-of the phenomenon of consciousness. Consciousness has an active aspect also, namely the feeling of free will.”

— Roger Penrose

35. “I argue that the phenomenon of consciousness cannot be accommodated within the framework of present-day physical theory.”

— Roger Penrose

36. “If you come from mathematics, as I do, you realize that there are many problems, even classical problems, which cannot be solved by computation alone.”

— Roger Penrose

37. “According to strong AI, it is simply the algorithm that counts. It makes no difference whether that algorithm is being effected by a brain, an electronic computer, an entire country of Indians, a mechanical device of wheels and.”

— Roger Penrose

38. “There are completely deterministic universe models, with clear-cut rules of evolution, that are impossible to simulate computationally.”

— Roger Penrose

39. “The more deeply we probe the fundamentals of physical behaviour, the more that it is very precisely controlled by mathematics.”

— Roger Penrose

40. “In order to decide whether or not an algorithm will actually work, one needs insights, not just another algorithm.”

— Roger Penrose

41. “Somehow, consciousness is needed in order to handle situations where we have to form new judgements, and where the rules have not been laid down beforehand.”

— Roger Penrose

42. “Every one of our conscious brains is woven from subtle physical ingredients that somehow enable us to take advantage of the profound organization of our mathematically underpinned universe-so that we, in turn, are capable of some kind of direct access, through that Platonic quality of ‘understanding’, to the very ways in which our universe behaves at many different levels.”

— Roger Penrose

43. “It would seem that it is in some kind of combination of top-down and bottom-up organization that we must expect to find the most successful AI systems.”

— Roger Penrose

44. “It is important to bear in mind that this is a property of single photons. Each individual photon must be considered to feel out both routes that are open to it, but it remains one photon; it does not split into two photons in the intermediate stage, but its location undergoes the strange kind of complex-number weighted co-existence of alternatives that is characteristic of quantum theory.”

— Roger Penrose

45. “Either individually or in these larger arrays, microtubules are responsible for cellular and intra-cellular movements requiring intelligent spatiotemporal organization. Microtubules have a lattice structure comparable to computational systems. Could microtubules process information?”

— Roger Penrose

46. “In some Platonic sense, the natural numbers seem to be things that have an absolute conceptual existence independent of ourselves.”

— Roger Penrose

47. “All I would myself ask for would be that our perceptive interrogator should really feel convinced, from the nature of the computer’s replies, that there is a conscious presence underlying these replies.”

— Roger Penrose

48. “I am not so much concerned, at this stage, with how individual mathematicians might differently approach a mathematical problem, but more with what is universal about our understandings and our mathematical perceptions.”

— Roger Penrose

49. “What is particularly curious about quantum theory is that there can be actual physical effects arising from what philosophers refer to as counterfactuals-that is, things that might have happened, although they did not in fact happen.”

— Roger Penrose

50. “The algorithm has some kind of disembodied ‘existence’ which is quite apart from any realization of that algorithm in physical terms.”

— Roger Penrose