42 quotes
Geometrical Speculations have just as much Elegancy as Simplicity, and deserve just so much praise as they can promise Use.
Arithmetica Universalis (1707)
The vis insita, or innate force of matter, is a power of resisting by which every body, as much as in it lies, endeavours to preserve its present state, whether it be of rest or of moving uniformly forward in a straight line.
Bullialdus wrote that all force respecting the Sun as its center & depending on matter must be reciprocally in a duplicate ratio of the distance from the center.
In my Judgment no Lines ought to be admitted into plain Geometry besides the right Line and the Circle.
Arithmetica Universalis (1707)
Useful Things, though Mechanical, are justly preferable to useless Speculations in Geometry, as we learn from Pappus.
Arithmetica Universalis (1707)
You sometimes speak of Gravity as essential and inherent to Matter. Pray do not ascribe that Notion to me; for the Cause of Gravity is what I do not pretend to know, and therefore would take more Time to consider it.
I seem to have been only like 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 have been much amused at ye singular φενόμενα [phenomena] resulting from bringing of a needle into contact with a piece of amber or resin fricated on silke clothe. Ye flame putteth me in mind of sheet lightning on a small—how very small—scale.
Geometry was invented that we might expeditiously avoid, by drawing Lines, the Tediousness of Computation.
Arithmetica Universalis (1707)
Through algebra you easily arrive at equations, but always to pass therefrom to the elegant constructions and demonstrations which usually result by means of the method of porisms is not so easy, nor is one's ingenuity and power of invention so greatly exercised and refined in this analysis.
One [method] is by a Watch to keep time exactly. But, by reason of the motion of the Ship, the Variation of Heat and Cold, Wet and Dry, and the Difference of Gravity in different Latitudes, such a watch hath not yet been made.
Written in remarks to the 1714 Longitude committee; quoted in Longitude (1995)
This is from an anecdote found in St. Nicholas magazine, Vol. 5, No. 4, (February 1878)
After the persecution of the Emperor Decius, Gregory Bishop of Neocaesarea in Pontus, instituted among all people, as an addition or corollary of devotion towards God, that festival days and assemblies should be celebrated to them who had contended for the faith (that is, to lie martyrs).
From blind physical necessity, which is always and everywhere the same, no variety adhering to time and place could evolve, and all variety of created objects which represent order and life in the universe could happen only by the willful reasoning of its original Creator, Whom I call the Lord God.
Our Humanist Heritage (2010)
What certainty can there be in a Philosophy which consists in as many Hypotheses as there are Phenomena to be explained. To explain all nature is too difficult a task for any one man or even for any one age. 'Tis much better to do a little with certainty, & leave the rest for others that come after you, than to explain all things by conjecture without making sure of any thing.
I fear what I have said of Infinities, will seem obscure to you; but it is enough if you understand, that Infinities when considered absolutely without any Restriction or Limitation, are neither equal nor unequal, nor have any Proportion one to another, and therefore the Principle that all Infinities are equal, is a precarious one.
I can calculate the motions of the heavenly bodies, but not the madness of the people.
Disputed
If I had stayed for other people to make my tools and things for me, I had never made anything.
Disputed This first appears in the Isaac Newton : A Biography (1934)
Tact is the knack of making a point without making an enemy.
Misattributed
Men build too many walls and not enough bridges.
Misattributed