“I don’t know what I may seem to the world,” he said before he died, “but, as 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.”
Isaac Newton, 1642-1746, the quintessential scientist; via Maria Popova in https://www.brainpickings.org/2016/02/16/newton-standing-on-the-shoulders-of-giants/