Isaac Newton Quotes

Let me think... I wonder if an anvil will drop like an apple?

I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only a boy playing on the seashore.

I keep the subject of my inquiry constantly before me, and wait till the first dawning opens gradually, by little and little, into a full and clear light.

The great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.

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

Impressed force is the action exerted on a body to change its state either of resting or of moving uniformly straight forward.

Errors are not in the art but in the artificers.

Whence arises all that order and beauty we see in the world?

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.

Every particle of matter is attracted by or gravitates to every other particle of matter with a force inversely proportional to the squares of their distances.

I do not think that this [the universe] can be explained only by natural causes, and are forced to impute to the wisdom and ingenuity of an intelligent.

If I have done the public any service, it is due to my patient thought.

All knowledge and understanding of the Universe was no more than playing with stones and shells on the seashore of the vast imponderable ocean of truth.

Is not Fire a Body heated so hot as to emit Light copiously? For what else is a red hot Iron than Fire? And what else is a burning Coal than red hot Wood?

We are to admit no more causes of natural things than such as are both true and sufficient to explain their appearances.

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

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

The instinct of brutes and insects can be the effect of nothing else than the wisdom and skill of a powerful ever-living agent.

Nature is very consonant and conformable with herself.

My principal method for defeating error and heresy is by establishing the truth. One purposes to fill a bushel with tares, but if I can fill it first with wheat, I may defy his attempts.

I see I have made my self a slave to Philosophy.

Pictures, propagated by motion along the fibers of the optic nerves in the brain, are the cause of vision.

The Synthesis consists in assuming the Causes discovered and established as Principles, and by them explaining the Phænomena proceeding from them, and proving the Explanations.

A cylinder of air reaching to the top of the atmosphere is of equal weight with a cylinder of water about 33 feet high.

Absolute, true and mathematical time, of itself, and from its own nature flows equably without relation to anything external.

Poetry is a kind of ingenious nonsense.

All the characters of the Passion agree to the year 34; and that is the only year to which they all agree.

I am ashamed to tell you to how many figures I carried these calculations [of Pi], having no other business at the time

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

Where both are friends, it is right to prefer truth.

The Ignis Fatuus is a vapor shining without heat.

I feign no hypotheses.

Every body persists in a state of rest or of uniform motion in a straight line, unless it is compelled to change that state by forces having impact upon it.

Centripetal force is the force by which bodies are drawn from all sides, are impelled, or in any way tend, toward some point as to a center.

Hypotheses non fingo. I frame no hypotheses.

Therefore to the same natural effects we must, as far as possible, assign the same causes.

When the adversaries of Erasmus had got the Trinity into his edition, they threw by their manuscript as an old almanac out of date.

His epitaph: Who, by vigor of mind almost divine, the motions and figures of the planets, the paths of comets, and the tides of the seas first demonstrated.

'Tis the temper of the hot and superstitious part of mankind in matters of religion ever to be fond of mysteries, and for that reason to like best what they understand least.

Philosophy is such an impertinently litigious lady that a man had as good be engaged in lawsuits as have to do with her.

Therefore, the causes assigned to natural effects of the same kind must be, so far as possible, the same.

No old Men (excepting Dr. Wallis) love Mathematicks.

Oh Diamond! Diamond! thou little knowest the mischief done! [Apocryphal]

The alternation of motion is ever proportional to the motive force impressed; and is made in the direction of the right line in which that force is impressed.

I can measure the motion of bodies but I cannot measure human folly.

The latest authors, like the most ancient, strove to subordinate the phenomena of nature to the laws of mathematics.

Bullialdus wrote that all force respecting ye Sun as its center & depending on matter must be reciprocally in a duplicate ratio of ye distance from ye center.

I do not feign hypotheses.

I understood. I have understood. I do understand.

...from the same principles, I now demonstrate the frame of the System of the World.