Quotes from Isaac Newton

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

Truth is the offspring of silence and meditation.

To arrive at the simplest truth requires years of contemplation.

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

To myself I am only a child playing on the beach, while vast oceans of truth lie undiscovered before me

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.

I have a fundamental belief in the Bible as the Word of God, written by those who were inspired. I study the Bible daily.

In the beginning of the year 1665, I found the method of approximating series and the rule for reducing any dignity of any binomial into such a series.

The great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.

All knowledge and understanding of the Universe was no more than playing with stones and shells on the seashore of the vast imponderable ocean of truth.

My principal method for defeating error and heresy is by establishing the truth. One purposes to fill a bushel with tares, but if I can fill it first with wheat, I may defy his attempts.

Where both are friends, it is right to prefer truth.

Truth is the offspring of silence and meditation. I keep the subject constantly before me and wait 'til the first dawnings open slowly, by little and little, into a full and clear light.

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

The best and safest method of philosophizing seems to be first to inquire diligently into the properties of things, and establishing those properties by experiments, and then to proceed more slowly to hypotheses for the explanation of them.

I do not love to be printed on every occasion, much less to be dunned and teased by foreigners about mathematical things or to be thought by our own people to be trifling away my time about them when I should be about the king's business.

It may be that there is no such thing as an equable motion, whereby time may be accurately measured. All motions may be accelerated or retarded, but the true, or equable, progress of absolute time is liable to no change.

In experimental philosophy, we are to look upon propositions inferred by general induction from phenomena as accurately or very nearly true, notwithstanding any contrary hypotheses that may be imagined, till such time as other phenomena occur by which they may either be made more accurate or liable to exceptions.

It is indeed a matter of great difficulty to discover, and effectually to distinguish, the true motions of particular bodies from the apparent because the parts of that immovable space, in which those motions are performed, do by no means come under the observation of our senses.

Resistance is usually ascribed to bodies at rest, and impulse to those in motion, but motion and rest, as commonly conceived, are only relatively distinguished; nor are those bodies always truly at rest, which commonly are taken to be so.

If anyone offers conjectures about the truth of things from the mere possibility of hypotheses, I do not see by what stipulation anything certain can be determined in any science, since one or another set of hypotheses may always be devised which will appear to supply new difficulties.

If I have ever made any valuable discoveries, it has been owing more to patient attention than to any other talent.

The motions of the comets are exceedingly regular, and they observe the same laws as the motions of the planets, but they differ from the motions of vortices in every particular and are often contrary to them.

God in the beginning formed matter in solid, massy, hard, impenetrable, movable 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.