Isaac Newton Quotes

"I have studied these things — you have not."

"God created everything by number, weight and measure."

"To every action there is always opposed an equal reaction."

"Tact is the art of making a point without making an enemy."

"It is the weight, not numbers of experiments that is to be regarded."

"Plato is my friend — Aristotle is my friend — but my greatest friend is truth."

"If I have seen further than others, it is by standing upon the shoulders of giants."

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

"Atheism is so senseless & odious to mankind that it never had many professors."

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

"Can it be by accident that all birds beasts & men have their right side & left side alike shaped.."

"If I had stayed for other people to make my tools and things for me, I had never made anything."

"Godliness consists in the knowledge love & worship of God, Humanity in love, righteousness & good offices towards man."

"To me there has never been a higher source of earthly honor or distinction than that connected with advances in science."

"It is the perfection of God's works that they are all done with the greatest simplicity. He is the God of order and not of confusion."

"A man may imagine things that are false, but he can only understand things that are true, for if the things be false, the apprehension of them is not understanding."

"We must love our neighbour as our selves, we must be charitable to all men for charity is the greatest of graces, greater then even faith or hope & covers a multitude of sins. We must be righteous & do to all men as we would they should do to us."

"To explain all nature is too difficult a task for any one man or even for any one age. 'Tis much better to do a little with certainty, & leave the rest for others that come after you, than to explain all things by conjecture without making sure of any thing."

"It seems probable to me that God, in the beginning, formed matter in solid, massy, hard, impenetrable, moveable particles, of such sizes and figures, and with such other properties, and in such proportions to space, as most conduced to the end for which He formed them;"

"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."

"I have not been able to discover the cause of those properties of gravity from phenomena, and I frame no hypotheses;' for whatever is not deduced from the phenomena is to be called a hypothesis, and hypotheses, whether metaphysical or physical, whether of occult qualities or mechanical, have no place in experimental philosophy."

"But as artificers do not work with perfect accuracy, it comes to pass that mechanics is so distinguished from geometry, that what is perfectly accurate is called geometrical; what is less so is called mechanical. But the errors are not in the art, but in the artificers. He that works with less accuracy is an imperfect mechanic: and if any could work with perfect accuracy, he would be the most perfect mechanic of all; for the description of right lines and circles, upon which geometry is founded, belongs to mechanics. Geometry does not teach us to draw these lines, but requires them to be drawn; for it requires that the learner should first be taught to describe these accurately, before he enters upon geometry; then it shows how by these operations problems may be solved."

Compiled by Thomas George
editor@Wisdom-of-the-Wise.com