Newton Quotes

“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 sorry of the man who, it seemed to me, was forced to hover about the edges of science. He was compelled to shiver endlessly in the outskirts, getting only feeble warmth from the distant sun of science- in-progress; while I, just beginning my research, was bathed in the heady liquid heat up at the very center of the glow.

In a lifetime of being wrong at many a point, I was never more wrong. It was I, not he, who was wandering in the periphery. It was he, not I, who lived in the blaze.

I had fallen victim to the fallacy of the 'growing edge;' the belief that only the very frontier of scientific advance counted; that everything that had been left behind by that advance was faded and dead.

But is that true? Because a tree in spring buds and comes greenly into leaf, are those leaves therefore the tree? If the newborn twigs and their leaves were all that existed, they would form a vague halo of green suspended in mid-air, but surely that is not the tree. The leaves, by themselves, are no more than trivial fluttering decoration. It is the trunk and limbs that give the tree its grandeur and the leaves themselves their meaning.

There is not a discovery in science, however revolutionary, however sparkling with insight, that does not arise out of what went before. 'If I have seen further than other men,' saidIsaac Newton,'it is because I have stood on the shoulders of giants.”
― Isaac Asimov, Adding a Dimension: Seventeen Essays on the History of Science

“Why should we place Christ at the top and summit of the human race? Was he kinder, more forgiving, more self-sacrificing thanBuddha?Was he wiser, did he meet death with more perfect calmness, thanSocrates?Was he more patient, more charitable, thanEpictetus?Was he a greater philosopher, a deeper thinker, thanEpicurus?In what respect was he the superior ofZoroaster?Was he gentler thanLao-tsze,more universal thanConfucius?Were his ideas of human rights and duties superior to those ofZeno?Did he express grander truths thanCicero?Was his mind subtler thanSpinoza’s? Was his brain equal toKepler’s orNewton’s? Was he grander in death – a sublimer martyr thanBruno?Was he in intelligence, in the force and beauty of expression, in breadth and scope of thought, in wealth of illustration, in aptness of comparison, in knowledge of the human brain and heart, of all passions, hopes and fears, the equal ofShakespeare,the greatest of the human race?”
― Robert G. Ingersoll, About The Holy Bible

“You could giveAristotlea tutorial. And you could thrill him to the core of his being.Aristotlewas an encyclopedic polymath, an all time intellect. Yet not only can you know more than him about the world. You also can have a deeper understanding of how everything works. Such is the privilege of living afterNewton,Darwin,Einstein,Planck,Watson,Crickand their colleagues.

I'm not saying you're more intelligent thanAristotle,or wiser. For all I know,Aristotle's the cleverest person who ever lived. That's not the point. The point is only that science is cumulative, and we live later.”
― Richard Dawkins

“He who thinks half-heartedly will not believe in God; but he who really thinks has to believe in God.”
― Isaac Newton

“What goes up must come down.”
― Isaac Newton

“When asked about which scientist he'd like to meet, Neil deGrasse Tyson said," Isaac Newton. No question about it. The smartest person ever to walk the face of this earth. The man was connected to the universe in spooky ways. He discovered the laws of motion, the laws of gravity, the laws of optics. Then he turned 26.”
― Neil deGrasse Tyson

“Nature and Nature's laws lay hid in night:
God said, Let Newton be! and all was light.”
― Alexander Pope

“...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 misery in the world. I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidæ with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of Caterpillars, or that a cat should play with mice... I feel most deeply that the whole subject is too profound for the human intellect. A dog might as well speculate on the mind ofNewton.Let each man hope and believe what he can.”
― Charles Darwin, The Life & Letters of Charles Darwin

“But, if we consider, as physicists now claim, that everything is energy—everything we see, everything we think, everything we do—then it is just possible that this same law of conservation of energy applies to questions of morality. A conservation of moral energy, a maintenance of equilibrium… a balance exists and must be preserved. If an action is taken that disrupts that balance, then an action similar in kind and degree is required to restore equilibrium.”
― J.K. Franko, Eye for Eye

“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 add something to the extent and the solidity of our possessions. And even a cursory glance at the history of the biological sciences during the last quarter of a century is sufficient to justify the assertion, that the most potent instrument for the extension of the realm of natural knowledge which has come into men's hands, since the publication ofNewton's ‘Principia’, isDarwin's ‘Origin of Species.”
― Thomas Henry Huxley

“So this is where all the vapid talk about the 'soul' of the universe is actually headed. Once the hard-won principles of reason and science have been discredited, the world will not pass into the hands of credulous herbivores who keep crystals by their sides and swoon over the poems of Khalil Gibran. The 'vacuum' will be invaded instead by determined fundamentalists of every stripe who already know the truth by means of revelation and who actually seek real and serious power in the here and now. One thinks of the painstaking, cloud-dispelling labor of British scientists from Isaac Newton to Joseph Priestley to Charles Darwin to Ernest Rutherford to Alan Turing and Francis Crick, much of it built upon the shoulders of Galileo and Copernicus, only to see it casually slandered by a moral and intellectual weakling from the usurping House of Hanover. An awful embarrassment awaits the British if they do not declare for a republic based on verifiable laws and principles, both political and scientific.”
― Christopher Hitchens

“...The Presidential election has given me less anxiety than I myself could have imagined. The next administration will be a troublesome one, to whomsoever it falls, and our John has been too much worn to contend much longer with conflicting factions. I call him our John, because, when you were at the Cul de sac at Paris, he appeared to me to be almost as much your boy as mine.

...As to the decision of your author, though I wish to see the book {Flourens’s Experiments on the functions of the nervous system in vertebrated animals}, I look upon it as a mere game at push-pin. Incision-knives will never discover the distinction between matter and spirit, or whether there is any or not. That there is an active principle of power in the universe, is apparent; but in what substance that active principle resides, is past our investigation. The faculties of our understanding are not adequate to penetrate the universe. Let us do our duty, which is to do as we would be done by; and that, one would think, could not be difficult, if we honestly aim at it.

Your university is a noble employment in your old age, and your ardor for its success does you honor; but I do not approve of your sending to Europe for tutors and professors. I do believe there are sufficient scholars in America, to fill your professorships and tutorships with more active ingenuity and independent minds than you can bring from Europe. The Europeans are all deeply tainted with prejudices, both ecclesiastical and temporal, which they can never get rid of. They are all infected with episcopal and presbyterian creeds, and confessions of faith. They all believe that great Principle which has produced this boundless universe,Newton’s universe andHerschel’s universe, came down to this little ball, to be spit upon by Jews. And until this awful blasphemy is got rid of, there never will be any liberal science in the world.

I salute your fireside with best wishes and best affections for their health, wealth and prosperity.

{Letter toThomas Jefferson,22 January, 1825}”
― John Adams, The Adams-Jefferson Letters: The Complete Correspondence Between Thomas Jefferson & Abigail & John Adams

“Lo que sabemos es una gota de agua; lo que ignoramos es un océano.”
― Isaac Newton

“If you’ve managed to do one good thing,
the ocean doesn’t care.
But when Newton’s apple
fell toward the earth,
the earth, ever so slightly, fell
toward the apple as well.”
― Ellen Bass

“Is it possible that the Pentateuch could not have been written by uninspired men? that the assistance of God was necessary to produce these books? Is it possible thatGalileiascertained the mechanical principles of 'Virtual Velocity,' the laws of falling bodies and of all motion; thatCopernicusascertained the true position of the earth and accounted for all celestial phenomena; thatKeplerdiscovered his three laws—discoveries of such importance that the 8th of May, 1618, may be called the birth-day of modern science; thatNewtongave to the world the Method of Fluxions, the Theory of Universal Gravitation, and the Decomposition of Light; thatEuclid,Cavalieri,Descartes,andLeibniz,almost completed the science of mathematics; that all the discoveries in optics, hydrostatics, pneumatics and chemistry, the experiments, discoveries, and inventions ofGalvani,Volta,FranklinandMorse,ofTrevithick,WattandFultonand of all the pioneers of progress—that all this was accomplished by uninspired men, while the writer of the Pentateuch was directed and inspired by an infinite God? Is it possible that the codes of China, India, Egypt, Greece and Rome were made by man, and that the laws recorded in the Pentateuch were alone given by God? Is it possible thatÆschylusandShakespeare,Burns,andBeranger,GoetheandSchiller,and all the poets of the world, and all their wondrous tragedies and songs are but the work of men, while no intelligence except the infinite God could be the author of the Pentateuch? Is it possible that of all the books that crowd the libraries of the world, the books of science, fiction, history and song, that all save only one, have been produced by man? Is it possible that of all these, the bible only is the work of God?”
― Robert G. Ingersoll, Some Mistakes of Moses

“Lest we forget, the birth of modern physics and cosmology was achieved by Galileo, Kepler and Newton breaking free not from the close confining prison of faith (all three were believing Christians, of one sort or another) but from the enormous burden of the millennial authority of Aristotelian science. The scientific revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was not a revival of Hellenistic science but its final defeat.”
― David Bentley Hart, Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies

“In the discoveries of science the harmony of the spheres is also now the harmony of life. And as the eerie illumination of science penetrates evermore deeply into the order of nature, the cosmos appears increasingly to be a vast system finely tuned to generate life and organisms of biology very similar, perhaps identical, to ourselves. All the evidence available in the biological sciences supports the core proposition of traditional natural theology - that the cosmos is a specially designed whole with life and mankind as a fundamental goal and purpose, a whole in which all facets of reality, from the size of galaxies to the thermal capacity of water, have their meaning and explanation in this central fact.

Four centuries after the scientific revolution apparently destroyed irretrievably man's special place in the universe, banished Aristotle, and rendered teleological speculation obsolete, the relentless stream of discovery has turned dramatically in favor of teleology and design, and the doctrine of the microcosm is reborn. As I hope the evidence presented in this book has shown, science, which has been for centuries the great ally of atheism and skepticism, has become at last, in the final days of the second millennium, what Newton and many of its early advocates had so fervently wished - the "defender of the anthropocentric faith.”
― Michael Denton, Nature's Destiny: How the Laws of Biology Reveal Purpose in the Universe

“Those whom nature destined to make her disciples have no need of teachers.Bacon,Descartes,Newton— these tutors of the human race had no need of tutors themselves, and what guides could have led them to those places where their vast genius carried them? Ordinary teachers could only have limited their understanding by confining it to their own narrow capabilities. With the first obstacles, they learned to exert themselves and made the effort to traverse the immense space they moved through. If it is necessary to permit some men to devote themselves to the study of the sciences and the arts, that should be only for those who feel in themselves the power to walk alone in those men's footsteps and to move beyond them. It is the task of this small number of people to raise monuments to the glory of the human mind.”
― Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on the Sciences and Arts and Polemics

“Human nature with all its infirmities and deprivation is still capable of great things. It is capable of attaining to degrees of wisdom and goodness, which we have reason to believe, appear as respectable in the estimation of superior intelligences. Education makes a greater difference between man and man, than nature has made between man and brute. The virtues and powers to which men may be trained, by early education and constant discipline, are truly sublime and astonishing.Isaac NewtonandJohn Lockeare examples of the deep sagacity which may be acquired by long habits of thinking and study.”
― John Adams, Familiar Letters of John Adams & His Wife Abigail Adams, During the Revolution

“Newton's work on gravity led to the discovery of the Lagrange point, a place where opposing forces cancel one another out, and a body may remain at relative rest. This is where I am right now; the forces in my life confound one another. Better, for the moment, to be here and now, without history or future.”
― Nick Harkaway, The Gone-Away World

“Things that look like they were designed, probably were... If intelligence is an operative component of the universe, a science that methodologically excludes its existence will be susceptible to being trapped in an endless chase for materialistic causes that do not exist... Where there are sufficient grounds for inferring intelligent causation, based on evidence of" specified complexity, "it should be considered as a component of scientific theories.

Inclusion of intelligent causation in the scientific equation is not novel and has not impeded the practice of science in the past, e.g. Newton and Kepler, in an age when science was not constrained by a philosophical materialism, and by many current scientists who have remained open to following the evidence where it leads.”
― Donald L. Ewert

“If you can't illustrate 'it', 'it' doens't belong in Physics as a noun! You can't put an article in front. You can't put a verb after!”
― Bill Gaede, Why God Doesn't Exist

“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 wishes more sincerely than I do, to see a complete refutation of the doubts I have myself entertained and expressed on the grade of understanding allotted to them by nature, and to find that in this respect they are on a par with ourselves. My doubts were the result of personal observation on the limited sphere of my own State, where the opportunities for the development of their genius were not favorable, and those of exercising it still less so. I expressed them therefore with great hesitation; but whatever be their degree of talent it is no measure of their rights. Because SirIsaac Newtonwas superior to others in understanding, he was not therefore lord of the person or property of others. On this subject they are gaining daily in the opinions of nations, and hopeful advances are making towards their reestablishment on an equal footing with the other colors of the human family.”
― Thomas Jefferson, Letters of Thomas Jefferson

“Pupuklah seni untuk menjadi orang yang menyenangkan dengan berbicara yang benar dan diam.”
― Sidney Newton Bremer

“Ciri khas diri kita, terdapat dalam kualitas pekerjaan kita.”
― Sidney Newton Bremer

“Newton, Darwin and Freud introduced determinism into everything they studied: the first into the universe, the second into the living world, and the third into the psyche.
All three types of determinism were to be questioned later, and in the same sequence. It all started with Einstein's denial of Newton's universe.”
― Alija Izetbegović, On Life, People & Freedom

“Christianity is the mother of science.”
― Alfred North Whitehead

“Strange how, as desire relaxes its grip on her body, she sees more and more clearly a universe read by desire. Haven't you read your Newton, she would like to say to the people in the dating agency (would like to say to Nietzsche too if she could get in touch with him)? Desire runs both ways. A pulls B because B pulls A, and vice versa: that is how you go about building a universe. Or if desire is still too rude a word, then what of appetency? Appetency and chance: a powerful duo, more than powerful enough to build a cosmology on, from the atoms and the little things with nonsense names that make up atoms to Alpha Centauri and Cassiopeia and the great dark back of beyond. The gods and ourselves, whirled helplessly around by the winds of chance, yet pulled equally towards each other, towards not only B and C and D but towards X and Y and Z and Omega too. Not the least thing, not the last thing but is called to by love.”
― J.M. Coetzee, Elizabeth Costello

“Strange how, as desire relaxes its grip on her body, she sees more and more clearly a universe ruled by desire. Haven't you read your Newton, she would like to say to the people in the dating agency (would like to say to Nietzsche too if she could get in touch with him)? Desire runs both ways: A pulls B because B pulls A, and vice versa: that is how you go about building a universe. Or if desire is still too rude a word, then what of appetency? Appetency and chance: a powerful duo, more than powerful enough to build a cosmology on, from the atoms and the little things with nonsense names that make up atoms to Alpha Centauri and Cassiopeia and the great dark back of beyond. The gods and ourselves, whirled helplessly around by the winds of chance, yet pulled equally towards each other, towards not only B and C and D but towards X and Y and Z and Omega too. Not the least thing, not the last thing but is called to by love.”
― J.M. Coetzee, Elizabeth Costello

“I am but one climbing a ladder of millions, and those millions have seen each beneath them, and held the same rungs of knowledge one after the other. I am just number million and one, and there are a billion more.”
― Blake Sevann