“I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore,” Isaac Newton is reported to have said, while “the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.”
The words are not found in Newton’s own writings. They first appeared in print in Joseph Spence’s Anecdotes, published in 1820, based on an account by Andrew Michael Ramsay. Whether Newton said them cannot be confirmed.