This most beautiful system of the sun, planets and comets, could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent and powerful Being.

Isaac Newton Principia, General Scholium (1713) Verified source · How we source quotes

Where this quote comes from

Newton added this to the General Scholium, the closing essay he wrote for the second edition of his Principia in 1713. Having set out the laws of motion and gravity, he argues that the arrangement of the sun, planets and comets points to an intelligent maker. He adds that God would have placed the fixed stars at immense distances so their gravity does not pull them into each other.

Source: Principia, General Scholium (1713)

Keep reading

All Isaac Newton quotes
English mathematician and physicist

If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants.

— The Correspondence Of Isaac Newton

English mathematician and physicist

This principle of nature being very remote from the conceptions of Philosophers, I forbore to describe it in that book, least I should be accounted an extravagant freak and so prejudice my Readers against all those things which were the main designe of the book.

— Opticks

English mathematician and physicist

Blind metaphysical necessity, which is certainly the same always and every where, could produce no variety of things. All that diversity of natural things which we find suited to different times and places could arise from nothing but the ideas and will of a Being, necessarily existing.

— The Principia: Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy

English mathematician and physicist

God who gave Animals self motion beyond our understanding is without doubt able to implant other principles of motion in bodies [which] we may understand as little. Some would readily grant this may be a Spiritual one; yet a mechanical one might be showne, did not I think it better to pass it by.

— The Correspondence of Isaac Newton: Published for the Royal Society. VOLUMES 1 through 7