Isaac Newton

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

Plato is my friend, Aristotle is my friend, but truth is my best friend.

Nature is pleased with simplicity. And nature is no dummy.

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 seashore, 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.

Every body continues in its state of rest, or of uniform motion in a right line, unless it is compelled to change that state by forces impressed upon it.

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

To every action there is always opposed an equal reaction: or, the mutual actions of two bodies upon each other are always equal, and directed to contrary parts.

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

Gravity explains the motions of the planets, but it cannot explain who set the planets in motion.

This most beautiful system of the sun, planets, and comets, could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent and powerful Being.

I frame no hypotheses.

For in experimental philosophy we are to look upon propositions inferred by general induction from phenomena as accurately or very nearly true, notwithstanding any contrary hypotheses that may be imagined, till such time as other phenomena occur, by which they may either be made more accurate, or liable to exceptions.

Errors are not in the art but in the artificers.

God created everything by number, weight, and measure.

The cause of gravity is what I do not pretend to know.

He who thinks half-heartedly will not believe in God; but he who thinks seriously will believe in God.

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

No great discovery was ever made without a bold guess.

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.

As a blind man has no idea of colors, so have we no idea of the manner by which the all-wise God perceives and understands all things.