SaturdayJan 03, 2026
Quotes: 53419 Authors: 9969
No great discovery was ever made without a bold guess.
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.
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.
... Newton was an unquestioning believer in an all-wise creator of the universe, and in his own inability like the boy on the seashore to fathom the entire ocean in all its depths. He therefore believed that there were not only many things in heaven beyond his philosophy, but plenty on earth as well, and he made it his business to understand for himself what the majority of intelligent men of his time accepted without dispute (to them it was as natural as common sense) the traditional account of the creation.
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 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.
Hypotheses non fingo. I feign no hypotheses.
On how he made discoveries by always thinking unto them.... I keep the subject constantly before me and wait till the first dawnings open little by little into the full light.
... from the same principles, I now demonstrate the frame of the System of the World.
If I have done the public any service, it is due to patient thought.
If I have ever made any valuable discoveries, it has been owing more to patient observation than to any other reason.
The latest authors, like the most ancient, strove to subordinate the phenomena of nature to the laws of mathematics.
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, and leave the rest for others that come after you, than to explain all things.
If I have seen further than others, it is by standing upon the shoulders of giants.
Men build too many walls and not enough bridges.
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