Isaac Newton Quotes on Truth
Isaac Newton’s General Scholium appended to the second edition of the Principia (1713) and the long sequence of theological and natural-philosophical manuscripts give the founder of modern mathematical physics his most distinctive engagement with the question of the truth of natural-philosophical assertion. The central commitments — that natural philosophy proceeds from carefully analyzed phenomena to the universal laws under which they fall, that it does not pretend to penetrate the underlying causes those laws describe (hypotheses non fingo), and that the order, beauty, and contrivance of the natural world together support the natural-theological inference to a designing and dominating divine intelligence — articulate a distinctive natural-philosophical methodology that distinguishes Newton’s commitments from both the Cartesian rationalism he displaced and the more deflationary instrumentalism his later interpreters would attribute to him. The framework shaped the eighteenth-century Newtonian natural-philosophical tradition and the broader debate over the relation between mathematical physical truth and the metaphysical-theological orders.
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:
“What we know is a drop, what we don't know is an ocean.”
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“This is a variation on a much older adage, which Roger Bacon attributed to Aristotle : Amicus Plato sed magis amica veritas . Bacon was perhaps paraphrasing a statement in the Nicomachean Ethics : Where both are friends, it is right to prefer truth.”
Amicus Plato — amicus Aristoteles — magis amica veritas