There Are Places in the World Where Rules Are Less Important Than Kindness Quotes

“To hear a cultivated person of today joking almost boastfully that they are completely ignorant about science is as depressing as hearing a scientist bragging that they have never read a poem. Poetry and science are both manifestations of the spirit that creates new ways of thinking the world, in order to understand it better. Great science and great poetry are both visionary, and sometimes may arrive at the same insights. The culture of today that keeps science and poetry so far apart is essentially foolish, to my way of thinking, because it makes us less able to see the complexity and the beauty of the world as revealed by both.”
― Carlo Rovelli, There Are Places in the World Where Rules Are Less Important Than Kindness

“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, There Are Places in the World Where Rules Are Less Important Than Kindness

“The greatness of literature lies in its capacity to communicate the experiences and feelings of human beings in all their variety, affording us glimpses of the boundless vastness of humanity.”
― Carlo Rovelli, There Are Places in the World Where Rules Are Less Important Than Kindness

“The reason behind the need to dominate others derives from a terror of being dominated by them.”
― Carlo Rovelli, There Are Places in the World Where Rules Are Less Important Than Kindness

“Those who criticize the usefulness of philosophy for science, Aristotle has noticed, are not doing science: they are doing philosophy.”
― Carlo Rovelli, There Are Places in the World Where Rules Are Less Important Than Kindness

“Probability does not refer to the system as such (the dice, the newspaper editor, the decaying atom, tomorrow's weather), but to the knowledge that I have about this system.”
― Carlo Rovelli, There Are Places in the World Where Rules Are Less Important Than Kindness

“I don’t like to thank God: I like to wake in the morning, look at the sea and thank the wind, the waves, the sky, the fragrance of plants, the life that allows me to exist, the sun that rises.”
― Carlo Rovelli, There Are Places in the World Where Rules Are Less Important Than Kindness

“Poetry and science are both manifestations of the spirit that creates new ways of thinking the world, in order to understand it better. Great science and great poetry are both visionary, and sometimes may arrive at the same insights. The culture of today that keeps science and poetry so far apart is essentially foolish, to my way of thinking, because it makes us less able to see the complexity and the beauty of the world as revealed by both.”
― Carlo Rovelli, There Are Places in the World Where Rules Are Less Important Than Kindness: And Other Thoughts on Physics, Philosophy and the World

“For a theoretical physicist such as myself, for an astronomer accustomed to thinking about the endless expanse of more than a hundred billion galaxies, each one consisting of more than a hundred billion stars, each one with its garland of planets, on one of which we dwell for a brief and fugitive moment, like specks of infinitesimal dust lost in the endlessness of the cosmos, this seems no more than obvious. Every anthropocentrism pales into insignificance in the face of this immensity. This is naturalism.”
― Carlo Rovelli, There Are Places in the World Where Rules Are Less Important Than Kindness: And Other Thoughts on Physics, Philosophy and the World

“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, There Are Places in the World Where Rules Are Less Important Than Kindness

“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.”
― Carlo Rovelli, There Are Places in the World Where Rules Are Less Important Than Kindness: And Other Thoughts on Physics, Philosophy and the World

“Einstein did not just wake up one morning thinking that nothing was faster than light, nor did Copernicus simply think up the idea that the Earth orbits the sun, Darwin that species evolve. New ideas do not just fall from the sky. They are born from a deep immersion in contemporary knowledge. From making that knowledge intensely your own, to the point where you are living immersed in it, from endlessly turning over the unanswered questions, trying all roads to a solution, then again trying all roads to a solution, and then trying all those roads again. Until there, where we least expected it we discover a gap, a fissure, a way through, something that no body had noticed before, but that is not in contradiction with what we know, something miniscule on which to exert leverage, to scratch the smooth, and unreliable edge of our unfathomable ignorance, to open a breach onto new territory.”
― Carlo Rovelli, There Are Places in the World Where Rules Are Less Important Than Kindness

“There is an enormous amount that we still don’t understand—because, as always, what we don’t know is vastly greater than what we know. But we are learning. Perhaps in a curious way, transporting ourselves back to our natural reality, which for Price has its roots in pragmatism and in a respect for what we have learned about reality thanks to scientific rationalism, ends up bringing us closer to the intuitions of Nietzsche, which along a different route have led to the excesses of postmodernism: before being a rational animal, man is a vital animal—“It is our needs that interpret the world . . . Every instinct has its thirst for dominion.” True, but our reason also emerges from this magma, and emerges as our most effective weapon. Price’s book argues with strength and rigor for a humble and complete naturalism: we are natural creatures in a natural world, and these terms give us the best conceptual framework for understanding both ourselves and the world. We are part of this tremendous and incredibly rich nature about which we still understand little, albeit enough to know that it is sufficiently complex to have given rise to all that we are, including our ethics, our capacity for knowledge, our sense of beauty and our ability to experience emotions. Outside of this there is nothing. For a theoretical physicist such as myself, for an astronomer accustomed to thinking about the endless expanse of more than a hundred billion galaxies, each one consisting of more than a hundred billion stars, each one with its garland of planets, on one of which we dwell for a brief and fugitive moment, like specks of infinitesimal dust lost in the endlessness of the cosmos, this seems no more than obvious. Every anthropocentrism pales into insignificance in the face of this immensity. This is naturalism. Emptiness Is Empty: Nāgārjuna December 8, 2017 We rarely come across a book with the capacity to influence our way of thinking.”
― Carlo Rovelli, There Are Places in the World Where Rules Are Less Important Than Kindness: And Other Thoughts on Physics, Philosophy and the World

“New knowledge emerges from present-day knowledge because within it there are contradictions, unresolved tensions, details that don’t add up, fracture lines.”
― Carlo Rovelli, There Are Places in the World Where Rules Are Less Important Than Kindness: And Other Thoughts on Physics, Philosophy and the World

“We live in a universe where ignorance prevails. We know many things, but there is a great deal more that we don't know. We don't know who we will encounter tomorrow in the street, we don't know the causes of many illnesses, we don't know the ultimate physical laws that govern the universe, we don't know who will win the next election, we don't really know what is good for us and what is bad. We don't know if there will be an earthquake tomorrow. In this essentially uncertain world, it would be foolish to ask for absolute certainty. Whoever boasts of being certain is usually the least reliable. But this doesn't mean either that we are completely in the dark. Between certainty and uncertainty there is a precious intermediate space - and it is in this intermediate space that our lives and our thoughts unfold.”
― Carlo Rovelli, There Are Places in the World Where Rules Are Less Important Than Kindness