What We Know Is A Drop

This aphorism is widely attributed to Isaac Newton but does not appear in his published works, letters, or documented manuscripts. It appears to be a condensed paraphrase of a well-known reflection Newton expressed near the end of his life — recorded by Sir David Brewster in Memoirs of the Life, Writings, and Discoveries of Sir Isaac Newton (1855) — in which Newton compared himself to "a boy playing on the sea-shore" while "the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered" before him. The drop-and-ocean formulation appears to be a modern distillation.