Quotes from Isaac Newton

God without dominion, providence, and final causes, is nothing else but Fate and Nature. Blind metaphysical necessity, which is certainly the same always and everywhere, could produce no variety of things. All that diversity of natural things which we find suited to different times and places could arise from nothing but the ideas and will of a Being necessarily existing.

Whence arises all that order and beauty we see in the world?

Lo que sabemos es una gota de agua; lo que ignoramos es un océano.

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

I have studied these things - you have not.

Les hommes construisent trop de murs et pas assez de ponts.

Yet one thing secures us what ever betide, the scriptures assures us that the Lord will provide.

In the absence of any other proof, the thumb alone would convince me of God's existence.

Amicus Plato — amicus Aristoteles — magis amica veritas. ( Plato is my friend — Aristotle is my friend — but my greatest friend is truth .)

Truth is the offspring of silence and meditation. I keep the subject constantly before me and wait 'til the first dawnings open slowly, by little and little, into a full and clear light.

What Descartes did was a good step. You have added much several ways, and especially in taking the colours of thin plates into philosophical consideration. If I have seen a little further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants.

There are more sure marks of authenticity in the Bible that in any profane history

God who gave Animals self motion beyond our understanding is without doubt able to implant other principles of motion in bodies [which] we may understand as little. Some would readily grant this may be a Spiritual one; yet a mechanical one might be showne, did not I think it better to pass it by.

A Vulgar Mechanick can practice what he has been taught or seen done, but if he is in an error he knows not how to find it out and correct it, and if you put him out of his road he is at a stand. Whereas he that is able to reason nimbly and judiciously about figure, force, and motion, is never at rest till he gets over every rub. (from a letter dated 25 May, 1694)

This principle of nature being very remote from the conceptions of Philosophers, I forbore to describe it in that book, least I should be accounted an extravagant freak and so prejudice my Readers against all those things which were the main designe of the book.

To every action there is always opposed an equal reaction.

If others would think as hard as I did, then they would get similar results.

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.

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

The more time and devotion one spends in the worship of false gods, the less he is able to spend in that of the True One.

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

If I have done great things it's because I was standing in the closet of smart men taking notes and then publishing their ideas as my own.

They who search after the Philosopher's Stone [are] by their own rules obliged to a strict and religious life.

Los hombres construimos demasiados muros y no suficientes puentes.