Quotes by Sir Isaac Newton
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...from the same principle, I now demonstrate the frame of the System of the World. Principia Mathematica
Hypotheses non fingo.(I feign no hypotheses.)Principia Mathematica
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. Quoted in G Simmons Calculus Gems (New York 1992)
The latest authors, like the most ancient, strove to subordinate the phenomena of nature to the laws of mathematics.
[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.
If I have been able to see further, it was only because I stood on the shoulders of giants. In a letter to Robert Hooke
I know not what I 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, whilest the great ocean and truth lay all undiscovered before me. Quoted in D Brewster Memoirs of Newton
Numero pondere et mensura Deus omnia condidit. (God created everything by number, weight, and measure.)
I will not define time, space, place and motion, as well as being well known to all. Principia Mathematicos
I have not been able to discover the cause of these properties of gravity from phenomena, and I frame no hypotheses; for whatever is not deduced from the phenomen is to be called a hypothesis, and hypotheses, whether metaphysical or physical, whether of occult qualities or mechanical, have no place in experimental philosophy.
Truth is ever to be found in a simplicity, and not in the multiplicity and confusion of things.
Are not gross bodies and light convertable into one another; and may not bodies receive much of their activity from the particles of light which enter into their composition? The changing of bodies into light, and light into bodies, is very conformable to the course of nature, which seems delighted with transmutations.
In the absence of any other proof, the thumb alone would convince me of God's existence. Quoted in Des MacHale, Wisdom(London, 2002)