# Isaac Newton quotes: real, disputed and misattributed

From 'standing on the shoulders of giants' and 'I frame no hypotheses' to the madness of people and the line about tact that belongs to another Newton: Isaac Newton's famous sayings, with what is really his and what is not.

- 179 votes · 12 items
- Dec 10, 2020 · millie_brighton
- https://even.best/en/l/4648/isaac-newton-quotes-real-disputed-and-misattributed

## Top 12

1. **To every action there is always opposed an equal reaction.** (18 · ▲18 ▼0) — Principia (1687), the third law of motion.
2. **Hypotheses non fingo – I frame no hypotheses.** (17 · ▲19 ▼2) — Principia, General Scholium (second edition, 1713).
3. **If I have seen further it is by standing on ye shoulders of Giants.** (17 · ▲18 ▼1) — Letter to Robert Hooke, 5 February 1675/76.
4. **…like a boy playing on the sea-shore… whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.** (16 · ▲18 ▼2) — Said near the end of his life, recorded in Joseph Spence's Anecdotes.
5. **I keep the subject constantly before me, and wait 'till the first dawnings open slowly, by little and little, into a full and clear light.** (10 · ▲11 ▼1) — Asked how he made his discoveries.
6. **If I had stayed for other people to make my tools and things for me, I had never made anything.** (10 · ▲10 ▼0) — Disputed: first appears in a 1934 biography citing unpublished papers.
7. **Truth is ever to be found in simplicity, and not in the multiplicity and confusion of things.** (8 · ▲12 ▼4) — Rules for methodizing the Apocalypse, manuscript.
8. **Plato is my friend, Aristotle is my friend, but my greatest friend is truth.** (8 · ▲11 ▼3) — Student notebook at Cambridge, c. 1664, written in Latin.
9. **I can calculate the motions of the heavenly bodies, but not the madness of the people.** (8 · ▲11 ▼3) — Disputed: said to be about losing money in the South Sea Bubble of 1720, but only reported decades later.
10. **Oh, Diamond! Diamond! thou little knowest what mischief thou hast done!** (7 · ▲10 ▼3) — Anecdote, probably apocryphal: to his dog, said to have knocked a candle onto years of papers.
11. **Tact is the knack of making a point without making an enemy.** (7 · ▲9 ▼2) — Misattributed: it is by the American advertising writer Howard W. Newton.
12. **Men build too many walls and not enough bridges.** (3 · ▲7 ▼4) — Misattributed: it comes from the American preacher Joseph Fort Newton.

How is this ranking ordered? By people's votes: each ▲ adds a point and each ▼ takes one away. Anyone can vote and add what is missing.