Sean M. Carroll Quotes

I confess, I do not believe in time.

No man ever wrote more eloquently and luminously [than Heraclitus].

It was Heraclitus' ideas that seized Nietzsche so totally that he became completely mad.

The space of early Greek cosmology was structured by logos - resonant utterance or word.

Plato was a bore.

I want to read philosophers.

I don't believe there's anything in life you can't go back and fix. The ancient Vedas - the oldest Hindu philosophy - and modern science agree that time is an illusion. If that's true, there's no such thing as a past or a future - it's all one huge now. So what you fix now affects the past and the future.

Greek philosophy seems to have met with something with which a good tragedy is not supposed to meet, namely, a dull ending.

The basic drive behind real philosophy is curiosity about the world, not interest in the writings of philosophers.

Philosophers write for professors; thinkers for writers.

I have known uncertainty: a state unknown to the Greeks.

Italy is full of historical buildings. And Europe holds a great history of philosophy from Greece until today. I read all those books and see these buildings, and I think of where I stand when I design my architecture.

While confronting the problems of the present, I often find myself thinking back to the world of books as it was experienced by the Founding Fathers and the philosophers of the Enlightenment.

Plato's philosophy is a dignified preface to future religion.

The question of the composition of perceptible objects is one which already occupied the mind of the ancient Greeks.

Novelists don't age as quickly as philosophers, who often face professional senility in their late twenties.

William James was not a prophet. He was a philosopher whose philosophy reflected his profound humanity.

Kant and Hegel are interesting thinkers. But I am happy to insist that they are also terrible writers.

Time is not a line, but a series of now-points.

In that prehistoric time, before the Internet, before information floated in the ozone, I was a soccer novice who had never heard of Socrates until somebody pointed him out - swarthy, shaggy, tall, slender, mysterious.

Simon Critchley's 'The Book of Dead Philosophers' - it's a quick thumbnail sketches of philosophers through the ages.

The question of causality is complex. For some philosophers and physicists, time might not exist. And since cause-and-effect reasoning needs the concept of time - of one thing preceding another - the effort to establish causality is a mug's game, an infinite regression of increasingly unanswerable questions.

There never was and is not likely soon to be a nation of philosophers, nor am I certain it is desirable that there should be.

We tend to think of philosophies as produced by professional philosophers. Traditionally, this has meant people who have written dissertations on obscure subjects or who spend most of their day in libraries. But every human is, in an important sense, a carrier of an implicit philosophy - evident in their choices, pronouncements and commitments.

Democritus's work on the void was revolutionary.