"Gravity explains the motions of the planets, but it cannot explain who sets the planets in motion."
"I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only a boy playing on the seashore."
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Source: Quoted in Christian Monitor, and Religious Intelligencer, 4 July 1812. An almost identical quotation by Newton, said to have been uttered a little before he died, appears in Joseph Spence, Anecdotes, Observations, and Characters of Books and Men, published in 1820 but extant in manuscript form from around 1730. A paraphrase of Newton's words was printed in a note in a 1797 edition of TheWorks of Alexander Pope.
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