WIST

If I have ever made any valuable discoveries, it has been owing more to patient attention than to any other talent.

Sir Isaac Newton (1642-1727) English physicist and mathematician
(Attributed)

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 sea-shore, 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.

Sir Isaac Newton (1642-1727) English physicist and mathematician
(Attributed)

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.

Sir Isaac Newton (1642-1727) English physicist and mathematician
Memoirs of the Life, Writings, and Discoveries of Sir Isaac Newton, 2.27 [ed. D. Brewster (1855)]

Everybody continues in its state of rest, or of uniform motion in a straight line, unless it is compelled to change that state by forces impressed upon it.

Sir Isaac Newton (1642-1727) English physicist and mathematician
Principia Mathematica (1687) [tr. A. Motte (1729)]