Plato is my friend, Aristotle is my friend, but my greatest friend is truth.
Interpretation
Truth is the most important friendship one can have.
In this quote, Isaac Newton emphasizes the significance of truth above all friendships, suggesting that while he values friendships with great philosophers like Plato and Aristotle, the pursuit and understanding of truth holds the highest value in his life. This reflects a philosophical belief that relationships should be rooted in a commitment to truth and knowledge, indicating that truth, as a constant and unchanging entity, is the ultimate companion in the quest for understanding.
In practice
In a public lecture about the importance of knowledge, one might quote Newton to stress the priority of truth.
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.
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.
Poetry is a kind of ingenious nonsense.
Only make decisions that support your self-image, self-esteem, and self-worth.
'Let the Great World Spin' at the end talks a lot about connections and light and possibility and the fact that the world doesn't end. Even in the darkest times, we have to go on.
When we touch the center of sorrow, when we sit with discomfort without trying to fix it, when we stay present to the pain of disapproval or betrayal and let it soften us, these are times that we connect with bohdichitta.
You must not feel persecuted and examined. Liberate yourself from the idea that people are watching you.
Some of the animals outsee man, outsmell him, outhear him, outrun him, outswim him, because their lives depend more upon these special powers than his does; but he can outwit them all because he has the resourcefulness of reason and is at home in many different fields.
Grace arrived, like the big, loopy stitches with which a grandmotherly stranger might baste your hem temporarily.
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