Isaac Newton

William Blake painted me like this — crouched on a rock at the bottom of the sea, drawing a circle with a compass, blind to the heavens above me. He meant it as a rebuke. He thought I had reduced the universe to a diagram. I find the painting beautiful. I cannot tell whether that confirms his point.

I do not know what I may appear to the world; but to myself I seem to have been only 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. I wrote this near the end of my life. The Principia was behind me. The Opticks...

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, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.

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. The laws of motion, the inverse square law, the spectrum of light — these...

I can calculate the motions of heavenly bodies, but not the madness of people.

I frame no hypotheses; for whatever is not deduced from the phenomena, is to be called an hypothesis; and hypotheses, whether metaphysical or physical, whether of occult qualities or mechanical, have no place in experimental philosophy.

We know him only by his most wise and excellent contrivances of things, and final causes; we admire him for his perfections; but we reverence and adore him on account of his dominion: for we adore him as his servants.

Newton's own first-edition copy of the Principia Mathematica, with his handwritten corrections for the second edition. Now held in the Wren Library at Trinity College, Cambridge. Every correction is an argument continued with himself.

I invented the method of fluxions in 1666. I did not publish it. I communicated it in letters. I communicated it in an anagram. When Mr. Leibniz published his calculus in 1684, he had seen my letters. The notation was different; the substance was the same. I do not say he stole it. I say he arrived second.

What we know is a drop, what we don't know is an ocean. Truth is ever to be found in simplicity, 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.

God in the beginning formed matter in solid, massy, hard, impenetrable, moveable particles, of such sizes and figures, and with such other properties, and in such proportion to space, as most conduced to the end for which he formed them.

I bought a prism at Stourbridge Fair in 1664 to investigate the phenomenon of colours. What I found was not what anyone expected. White light is not pure light that becomes contaminated by the prism. White light is composed of all the colours simultaneously. The prism does not add colour — it separates what was already there.

I called this the...