"O Diamond! Diamond! Thou little knowest the mischief done!" (Said to a pet dog who knocked over a candle and set fire to his papers.)

"I do not know what I may appear to the world; but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me."19

"If I have seen further (than you and Descartes) it is by standing upon the shoulders of Giants."20

"I have not yet been able to discover the cause of these properties of gravity from phenomena and I frame no hypotheses... It is enough that gravity does really exist and acts according to the laws I have explained, and that it abundantly serves to account for all the motions of celestial bodies.
That one body may act upon another at a distance through a vacuum without the mediation of anything else, by and through which their action and force may be conveyed from one another, is to me so great an absurdity that, I believe, no man who has in philosophic matters a competent faculty of thinking could ever fall into it."21