The known is finite, the unknown infinite; intellectually we stand on an islet in the midst of an illimitable ocean of inexplicability. Our business in every generation is to reclaim a little more land, to...

This change in the conception of reality is the most profound and the most fruitful that physics has experienced since the time of Newton.{Referring to James Clerk Maxwell’s contributions to physics}

[All phenomena] are equally susceptible of being calculated, and all that is necessary, to reduce the whole of nature to laws similar to those which Newton discovered with the aid of the calculus, is to...

Newton took no exercise, indulged in no amusements, and worked incessantly, often spending eighteen or nineteen hours out of the twenty-four in writing.

Always preoccupied with his profound researches, the great Newton showed in the ordinary-affairs of life an absence of mind which has become proverbial. It is related that one day, wishing to find the number of...

Force,” they make a barber’s block,Ready to put onMeanings most strange and various, fit to shockPupils of Newton….The phrases of last century in thisLinger to play tricks—Vis viva and Vis Mortua and Vis Acceleratrix:—Those long-nebbed...

…But I own that I cannot see as plainly as others do, and as I should wish to do, evidence of design and beneficence on all sides of us. There seems to me too much...

Newton supposed that the case of the planet was similar to that of [a ball spun around on the end of an elastic string]; that it was always pulled in the direction of the sun,...

From one sublime genius—NEWTON—more light has proceeded than the labour of a thousand years preceding had been able to produce.

Notwithstanding all that has been discovered since Newton’s time, his saying that we are little children picking up pretty pebbles on the beach while the whole ocean lies before us unexplored remains substantially as true...