Quotes
Isaac Newton Quotes: 35 Sayings to Inspire You to Think and Act
Isaac Newton is one of the most influential scientists in the history of mankind. When he was a teenager, his mother pulled him out of school in order to help out at their family farm. Newton did not have an interest in being a farmer with his love for learning, thus he went back to finish school.
His masterpiece Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica (which means “Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy”) was published in 1687. It is here where he describes his famous three laws of motion along with the law of gravity. In addition to this, he invented the reflecting telescope and a new type of math called “fluxions,” which we now know as calculus.
Pick the one Newton quote that fits what you are working on right now, write it somewhere you will see it, and come back to it when you hit a tough problem. Curiosity and patience tend to pay off more slowly than we expect.
Below are 35 of Newton’s most famous quotes:
Isaac Newton Quotes: Curiosity and Discovery
1. “If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants.” – Isaac Newton
2. “Nature is pleased with simplicity, and affects not the pomp of superfluous causes.” – Isaac Newton
3. “Whence is it that Nature doth nothing in vain? And whence arises all that order and beauty which we see in the world?” – Isaac Newton
4. “No great discovery was ever made without a bold guess.” – Isaac Newton
5. “Truth is ever to be found in the simplicity, and not in the multiplicity and confusion of things.” – Isaac Newton
6. “Every body perseveres in its state of rest, or of uniform motion in a right line, unless it is compelled to change that state by forces impressed thereon.” – Isaac Newton
7. “Useful things, though mechanical, are justly preferable to useless speculations in geometry.” – Isaac Newton
8. “If I had stayed for other people to make my tools and things for me, I had never made anything of it.” – Isaac Newton
9. “My design in this book is not to explain the properties of light by hypotheses, but to propose and prove them by reason and experiments.” – Isaac Newton
Sir Isaac Newton Quotes: Truth, Experiments and Evidence
10. “Plato is my friend; Aristotle is my friend, but my greatest friend is truth.” – Isaac Newton
11. “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.” – Isaac Newton
12. “I frame no hypotheses.” – Isaac Newton
13. “The proper method for inquiring after the properties of things is to deduce them from experiments.” – Isaac Newton
14. “The best and safest method of philosophizing seems to be first to inquire diligently into the properties of things, and establishing those properties by experiments, and then to proceed more slowly to hypotheses for the explanation of them.” – Isaac Newton
15. “We are certainly not to relinquish the evidence of experiments for the sake of dreams and vain fictions of our own devising; nor are we to recede from the analogy of Nature, which is wont to be simple and always consonant to itself.” – Isaac Newton
16. “It is the weight, not numbers of experiments that is to be regarded.” – Isaac Newton
Newton Quotes: Patience and Hard Work
17. “If I have ever made any valuable discoveries, it has been due more to patient attention, than to any other talent.” – Isaac Newton
18. “In those days I was in the prime of my age for invention, and minded mathematics and philosophy more than at any time since.” – Isaac Newton
19. “To every action there is always opposed an equal reaction.” – Isaac Newton
20. “My powers are ordinary. Only my application brings me success.” – Isaac Newton
21. “This most beautiful system of the sun, planets, and comets, could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent and powerful Being.” – Isaac Newton
22. “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.” – Isaac Newton
23. “If I have done the public any service this way, it is due to nothing but industry and patient thought.” – Isaac Newton
24. “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 all things by conjecture without making sure of any thing.” – Isaac Newton
25. “Errors are not in the art but in the artificers.” – Isaac Newton
26. “As in mathematics, so in natural philosophy, the investigation of difficult things by the method of analysis ought ever to precede the method of composition.” – Isaac Newton
Quotes by Isaac Newton: Nature, Gravity and Mathematics
27. “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.” – Isaac Newton
28. “God created everything by number, weight and measure.” – Isaac Newton
29. “Geometrical Speculations have just as much Elegancy as Simplicity, and deserve just so much praise as they can promise Use.” – Isaac Newton
30. “Geometry was invented that we might expeditiously avoid, by drawing Lines, the Tediousness of Computation.” – Isaac Newton
31. “In Constructions that are equally Geometrical, the most simple are always to be preferr’d.” – Isaac Newton
32. “I have explained the phenomena of the heavens and of our sea by the force of gravity, but I have not yet assigned a cause to gravity.” – Isaac Newton
33. “The moon gravitates towards the earth and by the force of gravity is continually drawn off from a rectilinear motion and retained in its orbit.” – Isaac Newton
34. “The motions of the comets are exceedingly regular, and they observe the same laws as the motions of the planets.” – Isaac Newton
35. “It may be that there is no such thing as an equable motion, whereby time may be accurately measured.” – Isaac Newton