English - Mathematician | December 25, 1642 - March 20, 1727
We are certainly not to relinquish the evidence of experiments for the sake of dreams and vain fictions of our own devising; nor are we to recede from the analogy of Nature, which is wont to be simple and always consonant to itself.
Isaac Newton
NatureDreamsSimpleAlwaysEvidence
We account the Scriptures of God to be the most sublime philosophy.
GodPhilosophyMostSublimeAccount
We are to admit no more causes of natural things than such as are both true and sufficient to explain their appearances.
AdmitTrueMoreExplainThingsThan
Gravity must be caused by an Agent acting constantly according to certain laws, but whether this Agent be material or immaterial I have left to the consideration of my readers.
ActingGravityLeftLawsMustAgent
Resistance is usually ascribed to bodies at rest, and impulse to those in motion, but motion and rest, as commonly conceived, are only relatively distinguished; nor are those bodies always truly at rest, which commonly are taken to be so.
RestResistanceAlwaysMotionOnly
Absolute space, in its own nature, without regard to anything external, remains always similar and immovable. Relative space is some movable dimension or measure of the absolute spaces, which our senses determine by its position to bodies, and which is vulgarly taken for immovable space.
NatureSpaceMeasureAlwaysAnything
To me there has never been a higher source of earthly honor or distinction than that connected with advances in science.
ScienceMeHonorConnectedNever
The best and safest method of philosophizing seems to be first to inquire diligently into the properties of things, and establishing those properties by experiments, and then to proceed more slowly to hypotheses for the explanation of them.
BestMoreFirstThingsExperiments
God is the same God, always and everywhere. He is omnipresent not virtually only, but also substantially, for virtue cannot subsist without substance.
GodVirtueSameAlwaysWithoutOnly
Hypotheses should be subservient only in explaining the properties of things but not assumed in determining them, unless so far as they may furnish experiments.
ThingsExperimentsMayOnlyFar
The motions which the planets now have could not spring from any natural cause alone, but were impressed by an intelligent Agent.
AloneSpringNowIntelligentNatural
It is reasonable that forces directed toward bodies depend on the nature and the quantity of matter of such bodies, as happens in the case of magnetic bodies.
NatureMatterDependQuantityForces
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