Isaac Newton Quotes

How came the bodies of animals to be contrived with so much art, and for what ends were their several parts?Was the eye contrived without skill in Opticks, and the ear without knowledge of sounds?...and these things being rightly dispatch’d, does it not appear from phænomena that there is a Being incorporeal, living, intelligent...?

No great discovery was ever made without a bold guess.

This most beautiful system of the sun, planets and comets, could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent and powerful Being.

Plato is my friend, Aristotle is my friend, but my greatest friend is truth.

Gravity explains the motions of the planets, but it cannot explain who sets the planets in motion.

If I have ever made any valuable discoveries it has been owing more to patient attention than to any other talent.

This principle of nature being very remote from the conceptions of Philosophers, I forbore to describe it in that book, least I should be accounted an extravagant freak and so prejudice my Readers against all those things which were the main designe of the book.

A Vulgar Mechanick can practice what he has been taught or seen done, but if he is in an error he knows not how to find it out and correct it, and if you put him out of his road he is at a stand. Whereas he that is able to reason nimbly and judiciously about figure, force, and motion, is never at rest till he gets over every rub.(from a letter dated 25 May, 1694)

I can calculate the motion of heavenly bodies but not the madness of people.

Blind metaphysical necessity, which is certainly the same always and every where, could produce no variety of things. All that diversity of natural things which we find suited to different times and places could arise from nothing but the ideas and will of a Being, necessarily existing.

I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.

For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.

For I see not what there is desirable in publick esteeme, were I able to acquire & maintaine it. It would perhaps increase my acquaintance, the thing which I chiefly study to decline.

If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants.

If I have seen farther it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.

To explain all nature is too difficult a task for any one man or even for any one age

If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I have stood on the shoulders of giants

Truth is ever to be found in the simplicity, and not in the multiplicity and confusion of things.

Truth is the offspring of silence and meditation. I keep the subject constantly before me and wait 'til the first dawnings open slowly, by little and little, into a full and clear light.

eorum omnium actiones in se invicem

God who gave Animals self motion beyond our understanding is without doubt able to implant other principles of motion in bodies [which] we may understand as little. Some would readily grant this may be a Spiritual one; yet a mechanical one might be showne, did not I think it better to pass it by.

Nature is pleased with simplicity. And nature is no dummy

What goes up must come down.