No great discovery was ever made without a bold guess.

This principle of nature being very remote from the conceptions of Philosophers, I forbore to describe it in that book, least I should be accounted an extravagant freak and so prejudice my Readers against all...

As every circumstance relating to so capital a discovery as this (the greatest, perhaps, that has been made in the whole compass of philosophy, since the time of Sir Isaac Newton) cannot but give pleasure...

Yet one thing secures us what ever betide, the scriptures assures us that the Lord will provide.

A Vulgar Mechanick can practice what he has been taught or seen done, but if he is in an error he knows not how to find it out and correct it, and if you put...

I have received the favor of your letter of August 17th, and with it the volume you were so kind as to send me on the Literature of Negroes. Be assured that no person living...

… for it is very probable, that the motion of gravity worketh weakly, both far from the earth, and also within the earth: the former because the appetite of union of dense bodies with the...

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...

God who gave Animals self motion beyond our understanding is without doubt able to implant other principles of motion in bodies [which] we may understand as little. Some would readily grant this may be a...

For I see not what there is desirable in publick esteeme, were I able to acquire & maintaine it. It would perhaps increase my acquaintance, the thing which I chiefly study to decline.

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

To explain all nature is too difficult a task for any one man or even for any one age

Plato is my friend, Aristotle is my friend, but my greatest friend is truth.

Nature is pleased with simplicity. And nature is no dummy

For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.

Les hommes construisent trop de murs et pas assez de ponts.

He who thinks half-heartedly will not believe in God; but he who really thinks has to believe in God.

Lo que sabemos es una gota de agua; lo que ignoramos es un océano.

A number of years ago, when I was a freshly-appointed instructor, I met, for the first time, a certain eminent historian of science. At the time I could only regard him with tolerant condescension.I was...

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

Blind metaphysical necessity, which is certainly the same always and every where, could produce no variety of things. All that diversity of natural things which we find suited to different times and places could arise...

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 was born at Woolsthorpe, near Grantham, in Lincolnshire, 1642: a weakly and diminutive infant, of whom it is related that, at his birth, he might have found room in a quart mug. He...

Gravity explains the motions of the planets, but it cannot explain who sets the planets in motion.