Isaac Newton quotes: real, disputed and misattributed
The top 3 according to 179 votes from people: To every action there is always opposed an equal reaction. · Hypotheses non fingo – I frame no hypotheses. · If I have seen further it is by standing on ye shoulders of Giants.. (Updated Dec 10, 2020.)
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.
Top 12
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1
To every action there is always opposed an equal reaction.
Principia (1687), the third law of motion.
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2
Hypotheses non fingo – I frame no hypotheses.
Principia, General Scholium (second edition, 1713).
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3
If I have seen further it is by standing on ye shoulders of Giants.
Letter to Robert Hooke, 5 February 1675/76.
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4
…like a boy playing on the sea-shore… whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.
Said near the end of his life, recorded in Joseph Spence's Anecdotes.
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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.
Asked how he made his discoveries.
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6
If I had stayed for other people to make my tools and things for me, I had never made anything.
Disputed: first appears in a 1934 biography citing unpublished papers.
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7
Truth is ever to be found in simplicity, and not in the multiplicity and confusion of things.
Rules for methodizing the Apocalypse, manuscript.
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8
Plato is my friend, Aristotle is my friend, but my greatest friend is truth.
Student notebook at Cambridge, c. 1664, written in Latin.
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9
I can calculate the motions of the heavenly bodies, but not the madness of the people.
Disputed: said to be about losing money in the South Sea Bubble of 1720, but only reported decades later.
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10
Oh, Diamond! Diamond! thou little knowest what mischief thou hast done!
Anecdote, probably apocryphal: to his dog, said to have knocked a candle onto years of papers.
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11
Tact is the knack of making a point without making an enemy.
Misattributed: it is by the American advertising writer Howard W. Newton.
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12
Men build too many walls and not enough bridges.
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.
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Comments (1)
Didn't know the walls and bridges one was a different Newton. Pretty sure my school had it painted on a wall with Isaac's name under it lol