Isaac Newton Quotes on Knowledge
Isaac Newton’s Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica (1687) and the later Opticks (1704) gave the early modern scientific revolution its principal mathematical synthesis and the modern conception of natural philosophical knowledge its founding model. The central methodological commitment — articulated in the four Rules of Reasoning in Philosophy that open Book III of the Principia — frames natural philosophy as the inductive demonstration of universal laws from carefully analyzed phenomena, with the corresponding restriction on framing hypotheses (hypotheses non fingo) directed against the Cartesian and broader continental rationalist programs that the empirical-mathematical synthesis of Newtonian gravitational theory was understood to displace. The framework, transmitted through the eighteenth-century Newtonian textbook tradition, supplied the dominant model of scientific knowledge for the subsequent two centuries of European philosophy and the broader modern reflection on the nature of empirical inquiry.
Quotes
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“If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.”
If I have seen further it is by standing on ye sholders of Giants . -
Attributed to Isaac Newton:
“I do not feign hypotheses.”
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“Plato is my friend, Aristotle is my friend, but my greatest friend is truth.”
Amicus Plato — amicus Aristoteles — magis amica veritas -
“Truth is ever to be found in simplicity, and not in the multiplicity and confusion of things.”
Cited in Rules for methodizing the Apocalypse , Rule 9, from a manuscript published in The Religion of Isaac Newton (1974) by Frank E. Manuel, p. 120, as quoted in Socinianism And Arminianism : Antitrinitarians, Calvinists, And Cultural Exchange in Seventeenth-Century Europe (2005) by Martin Mulsow, Jan Rohls, p. 273. | Variant: Truth is ever to be found in the simplicity, and not in the multiplic -
Attributed to Isaac Newton:
“I can calculate the motion of heavenly bodies, but not the madness of people.”
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Attributed to Isaac Newton:
“What we know is a drop, what we don't know is an ocean.”
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“Amicus Plato — amicus Aristoteles — magis amica veritas”
Plato is my friend — Aristotle is my friend — but my greatest friend is truth . | These are notes in Latin that Newton wrote to himself that he titled: Quaestiones Quaedam Philosophicae [Certain Philosophical Questions] (c. 1664) | Variant translations: Plato is my friend, Aristotle is my friend, but my best friend is truth. Plato is my friend — Aristotle is my friend — truth is a greater friend. -
“These are notes in Latin that Newton wrote to himself that he titled: Quaestiones Quaedam Philosophicae [Certain Philosophical Questions] (c. 1664)”
Amicus Plato — amicus Aristoteles — magis amica veritas -
“The best and safest method of philosophizing seems to be, first to enquire diligently into the properties of things, and to establish these properties by experiment, and then to proceed more slowly to hypothesis for the explanation of them. For hypotheses should be employed only in explaining the properties of things, but not assumed in determining them, unless so far as they may furnish experiments.”
Letter to Ignatius Pardies (1672) Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society (Feb. 1671/2) as quoted by William L. Harper, Isaac Newton's Scientific Method: Turning Data Into Evidence about Gravity and Cosmology (2011) -
“The best and safest method of philosophizing seems to be, first to enquire diligently into the properties of things, and to establish these properties by experiment, and then to proceed more slowly to hypothesis for the explanation of them. For hypotheses should be employed only in explaining the properties of things, but not assumed in determining them, unless so far as they may furnish experimen”
Letter to Ignatius Pardies (1672) Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society (Feb. 1671/2) as quoted by William L. Harper, Isaac Newton's Scientific Method: Turning Data Into Evidence about Gravity and Cosmology (2011) -
“1. Fidelity & Allegiance sworn to the King is only such a fidelity and obedience as is due to him by the law of the land; for were that faith and allegiance more than what the law requires, we would swear ourselves slaves , and the King absolute; whereas, by the law, we are free men, notwithstanding those Oaths. 2. When , therefore, the obligation by the law to fidelity and allegiance ceases, that”
Letter to Dr. Covel Feb. 21, (1688-9) Thirteen Letters from Sir Isaac Newton to J. Covel, D.D. (1848)