"If I have seen further [than certain other men] it is by standing upon the shoulders of giants."
"No being exists or can exist which is not related to space in some way. God is everywhere, created minds are somewhere, and body is in the space that it occupies; and whatever is neither everywhere nor anywhere does not exist. And hence it follows that space is an effect arising from the first existence of being, because when any being is postulated, space is postulated."
"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."
"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."
"If I have ever made any valuable discoveries, it has been owing more to patient attention, than to any other talent."
"Tact is the knack of making a point without making an enemy."
"No great discovery was ever made without a bold guess."
"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 build too many walls and not enough bridges."
"To me there has never been a higher source of earthly honor or distinction than that connected with advances in science."
"This most beautiful system [The Universe] could only proceed from the dominion of an intelligent and powerful Being."
"If I am anything, which I highly doubt, I have made myself so by hard work."
"If I am anything, which I highly doubt, I have made myself so by hard work."
"About the Time of the End, a body of men will be raised up who will turn their attention to the Prophecies, and insist upon their literal interpretation, in the midst of much clamor and opposition"
"It is the weight, not numbers of experiments that is to be regarded."
"Oh Diamond! Diamond! Thou little knowest the mischief done! (Said to a pet dog who knocked over a candle and set fire to his papers"
"Errors are not in the art but in the artificers."
"The seed of a tree has the nature of a branch or twig or bud. It is a part of the tree, but if separated and set in the earth to be better nourished, the embryo or young tree contained in it takes root and grows into a new tree."
"I can calculate the motion of heavenly bodies, but not the madness of people."
"Yet one thing secures us what ever betide,/ The scriptures assures us the Lord will provide."
Quotations About Sir Isaac Newton
"There is no need to worry about mere size. We do not necessarily respect a fat man more than a thin man. Sir Isaac Newton was very much smaller than a hippopotamus, but we do not on that account value him less."Bertrand Russell (1872–1970), British philosopher, mathematician.
"The Expanding Mental Universe," Saturday Evening Post (New York, July 1959).
"Nature and Nature’s laws lay hid in night;
God said Let Newton be! and all was light."
Alexander Pope (1688–1744), British satirical poet.
Epitaph Intended for Sir Isaac Newton in Westminster Abbey (1730).
"A learned parson, rusting in his cell at Oxford or Cambridge, will reason admirably well on the nature of man; will profoundly analyse the head, the heart, the reason, the will, the passions, the sentiments, and all those subdivisions of we know not what; and yet, unfortunately, he knows nothing of man.... He views man as he does colours in Sir Isaac Newton’s prism, where only the capital ones are seen; but an experienced dyer knows all their various shades and gradations, together with the result of their several mixtures."
Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl Chesterfield (1694–1773), British statesman, man of letters.
letter, Apr. 30, 1752, Letters Written by the Late Right Honourable Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl, Earl of Chesterfield, to his Son, Philip Stanhope, 4th Earl, Esq, 5th ed., vol. III, pp. 295-96, London (1774).