If I have ever made any valuable discoveries, it has been due more to patient attention, than to any other talent
Interpretation
Valuable discoveries are often the result of patience and focus rather than innate talent.
This quote by Isaac Newton emphasizes the importance of patience and dedication in the pursuit of knowledge and discoveries. Newton suggests that success in scientific endeavors is less about natural talent and more about the ability to pay attention and persist in one's efforts over time, highlighting a key aspect of the scientific method and intellectual growth.
In practice
This quote can be used in a motivational speech to encourage students to focus on their studies.
The best and safest way of philosophising seems to be, first to enquire diligently into the properties of things, and to establish those properties by experiences [experiments] and then to proceed slowly to hypotheses for the explanation of them. For hypotheses should be employed only in explaining the properties of things, but not assumed in determining them; unless so far as they may furnish experiments.
Plato is my friend, Aristotle is my friend, but my greatest friend is truth.
His epitaph: Who, by vigor of mind almost divine, the motions and figures of the planets, the paths of comets, and the tides of the seas first demonstrated.
And from true lordship it follows that the true God is living, intelligent, and powerful; from the other perfections, that he is supreme, or supremely perfect. He is eternal and infinite, omnipotent and omniscient; that is, he endures from eternity to eternity; and he is present from infinity to infinity; he rules all things, and he knows all things that happen or can happen.
My Design in this Book is not to explain the Properties of Light by Hypotheses, but to propose and prove them by Reason and Experiments: In order to which, I shall premise the following Definitions and Axioms.
It is the weight, not numbers of experiments that is to be regarded.
A little too much anger, too often or at the wrong time, can destroy more than you would ever imagine.
His past was fairly blameless; few men could read the rolls of their life with less apprehension; yet he was humbled to the dust by the many ill things he had done, and raised up again into sober and fearful gratitude by the many he had come so near to doing, yet avoided.
Listen! Clam up your mouth and be silent like an oyster shell, for that tongue of yours is the enemy of the soul, my friend. When the lips are silent, the heart has a hundred tongues.
I know now that what makes a fool is an inability to take even his own good advice.
No disaster is worse than being discontented.
I have lived to prove Thoreau's contention that a man is rich in proportion to the number of things which he can afford to let alone.
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