Newton's apple

Fame

French mathematician Joseph-Louis Lagrange often said that Newton was the greatest genius who ever lived, and once added that he was also "the most fortunate, for we cannot find more than once a system of the world to establish." English poet Alexander Pope was moved by Newton's accomplishments to write the famous epitaph:

“ Nature and nature's laws lay hid in night;

God said "Let Newton be" and all was light.
”

Newton himself was rather more modest of his own achievements, famously writing in a letter to Robert Hooke in February 1676

"If I have seen further it is by standing on ye shoulders of giants"

Historians generally think the above quote was an attack on Hooke (who was short and hunchbacked). The two were in a dispute over optical discoveries at the time. So this was an insult rather than (or in addition to) a statement of modesty. The latter interpretation also fits with many of his other disputes over his discoveries - such as the question of who discovered calculus as discussed above. and then in a memoir later

"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 sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me."