Isaac Newton

“Oh, Diamond! Diamond! thou little knowest what mischief thou hast done!”

“Geometry was invented that we might expeditiously avoid, by drawing Lines, the Tediousness of Computation.”

“God created everything by number, weight and measure.”

“But if I have done the public any service this way, 'tis due to nothing but industry and a patient thought.”

“I have not been able to discover the cause of those properties of gravity from phenomena, and 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 constantly before me, and wait 'till the first dawnings open slowly, by little and little, into a full and clear light.”

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

“Plato is my friend — Aristotle is my friend — but my greatest friend is truth.”

“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 sea-shore, 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.”

“If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.”