Isaac Newton Quotes

“What we know is a drop, what we don't know is an ocean.”

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

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

“Nature is pleased with simplicity.”

“Men build too many walls and not enough bridges.”

“Live your life as an exclamation rather than an explanation.”

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

“If I have ever made any valuable discoveries, it has been due more to patient attention, than to any other talent.”

“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 seashore, 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.”

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

“My powers are ordinary. Only my application brings me success.”

“I don't know what I may seem to the world, but, as 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 undiscovered before me.”

“The one proceeds upon the Evidence arising from Experiments and Phenomena, and stops where such Evidence is wanting; the other is taken up with Hypotheses, and propounds them, not to be examined by Experiments, but to be believed without Examination.”

“I never knew him to take any recreation or pastime either in riding out to take the air, walking, bowling, or any other exercise whatever, thinking all hours lost that was not spent in his studies, to which he kept so close that he seldom left his chamber.”

“In experimental philosophy, propositions gathered from phenomena by induction should be taken to be either exactly or very nearly true notwithstanding any contrary hypotheses, until yet other phenomena make such propositions either more exact or liable to exceptions. This rule should be followed so that arguments based on induction may not be nullified by hypotheses.”

“That gravity should be innate, inherent, and essential to matter, so that one body may act upon another at a distance through a vacuum, without the mediation of anything else, by and through which their action and force may be conveyed from one to another, is to me so great an absurdity that I believe no man who has in philosophical matters a competent faculty of thinking can ever fall into it.”

“I have not as yet been able to deduce from phenomena the reason for these properties of gravity, and I do not feign hypotheses.”

“Newton was not the first of the age of reason. He was the last of the magicians, the last of the Babylonians and Sumerians, the last great mind that looked out on the visible and intellectual world with the same eyes as those who began to build our intellectual inheritance rather less than 10,000 years ago.”

“Nature and Nature's laws lay hid in night; God said, "Let Newton be" and all was light.”