“I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I appear to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, picking up a shell or a pretty pebble, while the great ocean of truth lay before me.”

The image reverses the usual portrait of a finished genius, and Newton wrote it after the achievement rather than before it. The shells on the shore are the small certainties he had managed to pick up while the ocean stayed out of reach.