The Big Picture Quotes

“Illusions can be pleasant, but the rewards of truth are enormously better.”
― Sean Carroll, The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself

“As we understand the world better, the idea that it has a transcendent purpose seems increasingly untenable.”
― Sean Carroll, The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself

“Poetic naturalism is a philosophy of freedom and responsibility. The raw materials of life are given to us by the natural world, and we must work to understand them and accept the consequences. The move from description to prescription, from saying what happens to passing judgment on what should happen, is a creative one, a fundamentally human act. The world is just the world, unfolding according to the patterns of nature, free of any judgmental attributes. The world exists; beauty and goodness are things that we bring to it.”
― Sean Carroll, The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself

“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, The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself

“The construction of meaning is a fundamentally individual, subjective, creative enterprise, and an intimidating responsibility.”
― Sean Carroll, The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself

“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, The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself

“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, The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself

“The mistake we make in putting emphasis on happiness is to forget that life is a process, defined by activity and motion, and to search instead for the one perfect state of being. There can be no such state, since change is the essence of life. Scholars who study meaning in life distinguish between synchronic meaning and diachronic meaning. Synchronic meaning depends on your state of being at any one moment in time: you are happy because you are out in the sunshine. Diachronic meaning depends on the journey you are on: you are happy because you are making progress toward a college degree. If we permit ourselves to take inspiration from what we have learned about ontology, it might suggest that we focus more on diachronic meaning at the expense of synchronic. The essence of life is change, and we can aim to make change part of how we find meaning in it.”
― Sean Carroll, The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself

“Albert Szent-Györgyi, a Hungarian physiologist who won the Nobel Prize in 1937 for the discovery of vitamin C, once offered the opinion that “life is nothing but an electron looking for a place to rest.”
― Sean Carroll, The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself

“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, The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself

“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, The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself

“The universe is not a miracle. It simply is, unguided and unsustained, manifesting the patterns of nature with scrupulous regularity. Over billions of years it has evolved naturally, from a state of low entropy toward increasing complexity, and it will eventually wind down to a featureless equilibrium. We are the miracle, we human beings. Not a break-the-laws-of-physics kind of miracle; a miracle in that it is wondrous and amazing how such complex, aware, creative, caring creatures could have arisen in perfect accordance with those laws. Our lives are finite, unpredictable, and immeasurably precious. Our emergence has brought meaning and mattering into the world.”
― Sean Carroll, The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself

“Biologists Robert Sapolsky and Lisa Share studied a group of Kenyan baboons who fed off the garbage from a nearby tourist lodge. The clan was dominated by high-status males, and females and lesser males would often go hungry. Then at one point, the clan ate infected meat from the garbage dump, which led to the deaths of most of the dominant males. Afterward, the “personality” of the troop completely changed: individuals were less aggressive, more likely to groom one another, and more egalitarian. This behavior persisted as long as the study continued, for over a decade.”
― Sean Carroll, The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself

“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, The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself

“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, The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself

“Everybody dies. 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, The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself

“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, The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself

“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, The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself

“All lives are different, and some face hardships that others will never know. But we all share the same universe, the same laws of nature, and the same fundamental task of creating meaning and of mattering for ourselves and those around us in the brief amount of time we have in the world.
Three billion heartbeats. The clock is ticking.”
― Sean Carroll, The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself

“Meaning in life can’t be reduced to simplistic mottos. In some number of years I will be dead; some memory of my time here on Earth may linger, but I won’t be around to savor it. With that in mind, what kind of life is worth living? How should we balance family and career, fortune and pleasure, action and contemplation? The universe is large, and I am a tiny part of it, constructed of the same particles and forces as everything else: by itself, that tells us precisely nothing about how to answer such questions. We’re going to have to be both smart and courageous as we work to get this right.”
― Sean Carroll, The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself

“9. We Can Do Better Than Happiness. We live at a time when the search for happiness has taken center stage as never before. Books, TV shows, and websites are constantly offering pointers about how to finally achieve and sustain this elusive and sought-after state of being. If only we were happy, everything would be okay. Imagine a drug that would make you perfectly happy, but remove any interest you might have in doing anything more than simple survival. You would lead a thoroughly boring treadmill of a life, from the outside—but inside you would be blissfully happy, romping through imaginary adventures and always-successful romantic escapades. Would you take the drug? Think of Socrates, Jesus, Gandhi, Nelson Mandela. Or Michelangelo, Beethoven, Virginia Woolf. Is “happy” the first word that comes to mind when you set out to describe them? They may have been—and surely were, from time to time—but it’s not their defining characteristic. The mistake we make in putting emphasis on happiness is to forget that life is a process, defined by activity and motion, and to search instead for the one perfect state of being. There can be no such state, since change is the essence of life.”
― Sean Carroll, The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself

“When exactly does the “wave function collapse” take place? (So you’re not kept in suspense, almost no modern physicist thinks that “consciousness” has anything whatsoever to do with quantum mechanics. There are an iconoclastic few who do, but it’s a tiny minority, unrepresentative of the mainstream.)”
― Sean Carroll, The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself

“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, The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself

“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, The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself

“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, The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself

“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, The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself

“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, The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself

“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, The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself

“Even if we don’t go as far as Descartes’s belief in an immaterial soul that somehow interacts with our body, it’s tempting to visualize a dictatorial “self” inside our brain that is the locus of our self-awareness. Philosopher Daniel Dennett coined the term “Cartesian theater” to describe the supposed mental control room containing a tiny homunculus who gathers all of the input from our sensory organs, accesses our memories, and sends out instructions to the various parts of our bodies. Consciousness”
― Sean Carroll, The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself

“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, The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself