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.

Errors are not in the art but in the artificers.

...from the same principles, I now demonstrate the frame of the System of the World.

Ax: 100 Every thing doth naturally persevere in yt state in wch it is unlesse it bee interrupted by some externall cause, hence... [a] body once moved will always keepe ye same celerity, quantity & determination of its motion.

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

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

The instinct of brutes and insects can be the effect of nothing else than the wisdom and skill of a powerful ever-living agent.