Isaac Newton — "Plato is my friend, Aristotle is my friend, but truth is more my friend."
Plato is my friend, Aristotle is my friend, but truth is more my friend.
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More from Isaac Newton
"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, & leave the rest for others that come after you, than to explain …"
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Details
A common variant of a Latin saying, attributed to Newton in various contexts.
Date: Undetermined, likely before 1700
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Understanding this quote
What it means
No matter how much you admire great thinkers, their authority doesn't override evidence. If a respected philosopher or scientist got something wrong, loyalty to them is no excuse for perpetuating the error. Truth — discovered through observation and rigorous reason — must rank above deference to tradition, reputation, or inherited doctrine. Deep admiration for a person and rejection of their mistaken ideas can coexist.
Relevance to Isaac Newton
Newton dismantled Aristotelian physics, which had governed Western scientific thought for nearly 2,000 years. His laws of motion directly contradicted Aristotle's claim that objects require continuous force to remain in motion. He also corrected Descartes and clashed with Hooke. Throughout his career, Newton prioritized experimental observation and mathematical proof over inherited authority — embodying this principle by overturning the very thinkers he acknowledged as intellectual forebears.
The era
Newton worked during the Scientific Revolution, when Aristotelian scholasticism still dominated European universities and the Church had prosecuted Galileo for challenging ancient cosmology. Plato and Aristotle were treated as near-sacred intellectual authorities. Contradicting them carried real professional and sometimes personal risk. This era demanded exactly Newton's stance: intellectual courage to follow evidence even when it overturned two millennia of entrenched orthodoxy and rewrote how humanity understood the physical world.
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