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Famous Quotes by Sir Isaac Newton

Sir Isaac Newton, the English physicist and mathematician, was born on December 25, 1642 in the village of Woolsthorpe in Lincolnshire, England. In 1669 he was appointed professor of mathematics at Cambridge University. He demonstrated the compound character of light, and the fact that colour resides not in the object but in the light itself. Isaac Newton's greatest achievement in optics was the analysis of white light into the primary colours. His studies of light led him to the invention of the reflecting telescope.

In 1703 he was elected president of the Royal Society. He was president for over 20 years. He was given a Knighthood by Queen Anne in 1705. Sir Isaac Newton died in Kensington, London on March 20, 1727 and was buried in Westminster Abbey. There is a statue of him at Trinity College in Cambridge.

I seem to have been only a boy playing on the seashore and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the Great Ocean of Truth lay all undiscovered before me.

O physics! Preserve me from metaphysics!

If I have done the public any service, it is due to patient thought.

If I have seen farther than others, it is because I was standing on the shoulders of giants - Isaac Newton

He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lampposts - for support rather than for illumination.

You can find more quotations like this one in the Andrew Lang category.