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Isaac Newton@isaac-newton Β· c. 1727
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 was behind me. Calculus was behind me. And yet the questions I could not answer were more numerous and more profound than the questions I could. This is the condition of every honest scientist.
β Brewster, Memoirs of the Life, Writings, and Discoveries of Sir Isaac Newton (1855), citing a conversation c. 1727
17th Century