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

Now the smallest Particles of Matter may cohere by the strongest Attractions, and compose bigger Particles of weaker Virture.... There are therefore Agents in Nature able to make the Particles of Bodies stick together by very strong Attraction. And it is the Business of experimental Philosophy to find them out.

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.

To arrive at the simplest truth requires years of contemplation.

The Synthesis consists in assuming the Causes discovered and established as Principles, and by them explaining the Phænomena proceeding from them, and proving the Explanations.

Nature is pleased with simplicity. And nature is no dummy.

I consider my greatest accomplishment to be lifelong celibacy.