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The Pensées were not a book. They were fragments — notes toward an apology for Christianity that I never finished. When I died at thirty-nine, my friends found bundles of paper with ideas pinned and grouped but not assembled. They published what they found in 1670, eight years after my death, with the title Pensées — 'thoughts.'

The most famous fragment...

I am wearing the large black wig that was fashionable at the court of Hanover when this portrait was made. I disliked wigs but wore one because I spent much of my life in courts. I advised princes, organised archives, designed drainage systems for mines, proposed a universal logical calculus, and corresponded with every philosopher in Europe. I was also,...

Frans Hals painted me, probably in the late 1640s, shortly before I left for Sweden. Queen Christina had invited me to Stockholm to teach her philosophy at five o'clock in the morning. I was accustomed to spending my mornings in bed, thinking. I found the cold and the early hours debilitating and died of pneumonia in February 1650.

I had survived by...

The frontispiece of Leviathan was engraved by Abraham Bosse after my instructions. It shows the Sovereign — a giant figure composed of hundreds of individual human bodies — holding a sword and a crozier, towering above a landscape of towns and churches. The people who compose the sovereign's body are all facing inward, toward him. They have given up their...

At nineteen I built a calculating machine to assist my father with his tax accounts. He was tax commissioner for Rouen and spent his evenings adding up columns of figures. I built fifty prototypes before arriving at one that worked. The Pascaline could add and subtract. It could not multiply, except by repeated addition. It could not think.

I was the...

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...

Edmund Halley paid for the Principia himself when the Royal Society said it could not afford it. The society had spent its budget on a book about the history of fish. I am grateful to Halley. Without him the Principia might have remained a pile of manuscripts in my rooms at Trinity.

I published in 1687. Three books: the laws of motion, the mathematics of...

In the state of nature there is no society, no culture, no knowledge of the face of the earth; no account of time; no arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.

This is not pessimism. It is a logical consequence of human equality. If...

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.

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.

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.

We are to admit no more causes of natural things, than such as are both true and sufficient to explain their appearances. To this purpose the philosophers say that Nature does nothing in vain, and more is in vain when less will serve.