Top 40 Sean Carroll Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Life ends, and that’s part of what makes it special. What exists is here, in front of us, what we can see and touch and affect. Our lives are not dress rehearsals in which we plan and are tested in anticipation of the real show to come. This is it, the only performance we’re going to get to give, and it is what we make of it.”

— Sean Carroll

2. “I leave Sisyphus at the foot of the mountain! One always finds one’s burden again. But Sisyphus teaches the higher fidelity that negates the gods and raises rocks. He too concludes that all is well. This universe henceforth without a master seems to him neither sterile nor futile. Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night-filled mountain, in itself forms a world. The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”

— Sean Carroll

3. “Those swirls in the cream mixing into the coffee? That’s us. Ephemeral patterns of complexity, riding a wave of increasing entropy from simple beginnings to a simple end. We should enjoy the ride.”

— Sean Carroll

4. “We talk about “awe and wonder,” but those are two different words. I am in awe of the universe: its scope, its complexity, its depth, its meticulous precision. But my primary feeling is wonder. Awe has connotations of reverence: “this fills me with awe and I am not worthy.” Wonder has connotations of curiosity: “this fills me with wonder and I am going to figure it out.” I will take wonder over awe every day.”

— Sean Carroll

5. “The trick is to think of life as a process rather than a substance. When a candle is burning, there is a flame that clearly carries energy. When we put the candle out, the energy doesn’t “go” anywhere. The candle still contains energy in its atoms and molecules. What happens, instead, is that the process of combustion has ceased. Life is like that: it’s not “stuff”; it’s a set of things happening. When that process stops, life ends.”

— Sean Carroll

6. “The physical notion of determinism is different from destiny or fate in a subtle but crucial way: because Laplace’s Demon doesn’t actually exist, the future may be determined by the present, but literally nobody knows what it will be.”

— Sean Carroll

7. “At heart, science is the quest for awesome – the literal awe that you feel when you understand something profound for the first time. It’s a feeling we are all born with, although it often gets lost as we grow up and more mundane concerns take over our lives.”

— Sean Carroll

8. “Life is a process, not a substance, and it is necessarily temporary. We are not the reason for the existence of the universe, but our ability for self-awareness and reflection makes us special within it.”

— Sean Carroll

9. “Where misunderstanding dwells, misuse will not be far behind. No theory in the history of science has been more misused and abused by cranks and charlatans – and misunderstood by people struggling in good faith with difficult ideas – than quantum mechanics.”

— Sean Carroll

10. “When we want something to be true, when a belief makes us happy – that’s precisely when we should be questioning. Illusions can be pleasant, but the rewards of truth are enormously greater.”

— Sean Carroll

11. “Way back in 1831, Michael Faraday, one of the founders of our modern understanding of electromagnetism, was asked by an inquiring politician about the usefulness of this newfangled “electricity” stuff. His apocryphal reply: “I know not, but I wager that one day your government will tax it”.”

— Sean Carroll

12. “What is the fundamental nature of reality? Philosophers call this the question of ontology – the study of the basic structure of the world, the ingredients and relationships of which the universe is ultimately composed. It can be contrasted with epistemology, which is how we obtain knowledge about the world. Ontology is the branch of philosophy concerned with the nature of reality; we also talk about “an” ontology, referring to a specific idea about what that nature actually is.”

— Sean Carroll

13. “Life is not a substance, like water or rock; it’s a process, like fire or a wave crashing on the shore. It’s a process that begins, lasts for a while, and ultimately ends. Long or short, our moments are brief against the expanse of eternity.”

— Sean Carroll

14. “In 1965, physicist Richard Feynman opined, “I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics,” and the sentiment is equally applicable today.”

— Sean Carroll

15. “That’s how science works. We don’t “prove” results like we can in mathematics or logic; we simply add to their plausibility by accumulating more and more evidence.”

— Sean Carroll

16. “If our lives are brief and undirected, at least we can take pride in our mutual courage as we struggle to understand things much greater than ourselves.”

— Sean Carroll

17. “The idea of “Ten Commandments” is a deeply compelling one. It combines two impulses that are ingrained in our nature as human beings: making lists of ten things, and telling other people how to behave.”

— Sean Carroll

18. “Don’t play Quantum Russian Roulette.”

— Sean Carroll

19. “If you believe that the atoms that are inside your brain and your body act differently because they are in a living person than if they were in a rock or a crystal, then what you’re saying is that the laws of physics are wrong.”

— Sean Carroll

20. “A hundred quintillion googols!”

— Sean Carroll

21. “If an ontology predicts almost nothing it ends up explaining almost nothing, and there’s no reason to believe it.”

— Sean Carroll

22. “Carl faced his death with unflagging courage and never sought refuge in illusions. The tragedy was that we knew we would never see each other again. I don’t ever expect to be reunited with Carl. But, the great thing is that when we were together, for nearly twenty years, we lived with a vivid appreciation of how brief and precious life is. We never trivialized the meaning of death by pretending it was anything other than a final parting.”

— Sean Carroll

23. “The enigma at the heart of quantum reality can be summed up in a single motto: what we see when we look at the world seems to be fundamentally different from what actually is.”

— Sean Carroll

24. “Illusions can be pleasant, but the rewards of truth are enormously better.”

— Sean Carroll

25. “It doesn’t include math or logic, nor does it address issues of judgment, such as aesthetics or morality. Science has a simple goal: to figure out what the world actually is. Not all the possible ways it could be, nor the particular way it should be. Just what it is. There’s.”

— Sean Carroll

26. “There is a wide gap between admitting that we don’t know everything about how the mind works and remembering that whatever it does, it needs to be compatible with the laws of nature.”

— Sean Carroll

27. “The ancient Greeks, according to Pirsig, “saw the future as something that came upon them from behind their backs, with the past receding away before their eyes.”

— Sean Carroll

28. “The punch line is that our notion of free will, the ability to change the future by making choices in a way that is not available to us as far as the past is concerned, is only possible because the past has a low entropy and the future has a high entropy. The.”

— Sean Carroll

29. “It’s possible that we are being watched and judged by a race of super-intelligent aliens, who will think badly of us and destroy the Earth if we allow ourselves to be cowed by frivolous lawsuits and don’t turn on the LHC. When possibilities become as remote as what we’re speaking about here, it’s time to take the risks and get on with our lives.”

— Sean Carroll

30. “If everything in the universe evolves toward increasing disorder, it must have started out in an exquisitely ordered arrangement. This whole chain of logic, purporting to explain why you can’t turn an omelet into an egg, apparently rests on a deep assumption about the very beginning of the universe. It was in a state of very low entropy, very high order. Why did our part of the universe pass though a period of such low entropy?”

— Sean Carroll

31. “So neurons talk to each other by squirting electrically charged molecules from the axon of one to a dendrite on another.”

— Sean Carroll

32. “Ernest Rutherford, a New Zealand–born experimental physicist who was as responsible as anyone for discovering the structure of the atom, once remarked that “all of science is either physics or stamp collecting.”

— Sean Carroll

33. “As we understand the world better, the idea that it has a transcendent purpose seems increasingly untenable.”

— Sean Carroll

34. “The construction of meaning is a fundamentally individual, subjective, creative enterprise, and an intimidating responsibility.”

— Sean Carroll

35. “Our goal over the next few chapters is to address the origin of complex structures – including, but not limited to, living creatures – in the context of the big picture. The universe is a set of quantum fields obeying equations that don’t even distinguish between past and future, much less embody any long-term goals. How in the world did something as organized as a human being ever come to be?”

— Sean Carroll

36. “Quantum reality is a wave function; classical positions and velocities are merely what we are able to observe when we probe that wave function.”

— Sean Carroll

37. “Nothingness, after all, is simpler than any one particular existing thing ever could be; there is only one nothing, and many kinds of something.”

— Sean Carroll

38. “Historically, nature has been very good at surprising us.”

— Sean Carroll

39. “Lederman is also a charismatic personality, famous among his colleagues for his humor and storytelling ability. One of his favorite anecdotes relates the time when, as a graduate student, he arranged to bump into Albert Einstein while walking the grounds at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. The great man listened patiently as the eager youngster explained the particle-physics research he was doing at Columbia, and then said with a smile, “That is not interesting.”

— Sean Carroll

40. “Human beings are not nearly as coolly rational as we like to think we are. Having set up comfortable planets of belief, we become resistant to altering them, and develop cognitive biases that prevent us from seeing the world with perfect clarity. We aspire to be perfect Bayesian abductors, impartially reasoning to the best explanation – but most often we take new data and squeeze it to fit with our preconceptions.”

— Sean Carroll

41. “Those who think of metaphysics as the most unconstrained or speculative of disciplines are misinformed; compared with cosmology, metaphysics is pedestrian and unimaginative. – Stephen Toulmin.”

— Sean Carroll

42. “There is a famous joke, attributed to Einstein: “When a man sits with a pretty girl for an hour, it seems like a minute. But let him sit on a hot stove for a minute and it’s longer than any hour. That’s relativity.” I don’t know whether Einstein actually ever said those words. But I do know that’s not relativity.”

— Sean Carroll

43. “But Waldegrave didn’t simply give up; he challenged the scientists to provide him with an understandable explanation of the role of the Higgs boson, one that would fit on a single piece of paper. He offered a bottle of vintage champagne to whoever came up with the best explanation. Miller and four colleagues managed to cook up an engaging metaphor that was deemed suitable by the science minister. All five got bottles of champagne, and of course the United Kingdom supported the LHC.”

— Sean Carroll

44. “Intellectual fascination crosses many boundaries.”

— Sean Carroll

45. “That’s what it was like to be Einstein in 1905: You publish a groundbreaking paper that helps lay the foundations of quantum mechanics, and for which you later win the Nobel Prize, but it’s only the second-most important paper that you publish in that issue of the journal.”

— Sean Carroll

46. “As far as quantum field theory is concerned, a human being or the center of a star isn’t all that different from empty space.”

— Sean Carroll

47. “One is our tendency to give higher credences to propositions that we want to be true. This can show up at a very personal level, as what’s known as self-serving bias:.”

— Sean Carroll