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.
I have lived to see that being seventeen is no protection against becoming seventy, but to know this needs the experience of a lifetime, for no imagination copes with it.
Little hinges swing big doors.
I wish I could say something classy and inspirational, but that just wouldn't be our style. ... Pain heals. Chicks dig scars. Glory... lasts forever.
If you read enough biography and history, you learn how people have dealt successfully or unsuccessfully with similar situations or patterns in the past. It doesn't give you a template of answers, but it does help you refine the questions you have to ask yourself.
As we look into the future, we are going to need to be stronger and more responsible for our choices in a world where people "call evil good, and good evil." We do not choose wisely if we use our agency in opposition to God's will or to priesthood counsel. Tomorrow's blessings and opportunities depend on the choices we make today.
Putting is like wisdom - partly a natural gift and partly the accumulation of experience.
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