---
title: "Standing on the shoulders of giants"
chunk: 2/2
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standing_on_the_shoulders_of_giants"
category: "reference"
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
date_saved: "2026-05-05T03:27:10.755565+00:00"
instance: "kb-cron"
---

Diego de Estella took up the quotation in his 1578 commentary on Gospel of Luke and by the 17th century it had become commonplace. Robert Burton, in the second edition of The Anatomy of Melancholy (1624), quotes Stella thus:

I say with Didacus Stella, a dwarf standing on the shoulders of a giant may see farther than a giant himself.
Later editors of Burton misattributed the quotation to Lucan; in their hands Burton's attribution Didacus Stella, in luc 10, tom. ii "Didacus on the Gospel of Luke, chapter 10; volume 2" became a reference to Lucan's Pharsalia 2.10. No reference or allusion to the quotation is found there.

In 1634, Marin Mersenne quoted the expression in his Questions harmoniques: ... comme l'on dit, il est bien facile, & mesme necessaire de voir plus loin que nos devanciers, lors que nous sommes montez sur leur espaules ...Blaise Pascal, in the "Preface to the Treatise on the Vacuum" expresses the same idea, without talking about shoulders, but rather about the knowledge handed down to us by the ancients as steps that allow us to climb higher and see farther than they could:C'est de cette façon que l'on peut aujourd'hui prendre d'autres sentiments et de nouvelles opinions sans mépris et sans ingratitude, puisque les premières connaissances qu'ils nous ont données ont servi de degrés aux nôtres, et que dans ces avantages nous leur sommes redevables de l'ascendant que nous avons sur eux; parce que s'étant élevés jusqu'à un certain degré où ils nous ont portés, le moindre effort nous fait monter plus haut, et avec moins de peine et moins de gloire nous nous trouvons au-dessus d'eux. C'est de là que nous pouvons découvrir des choses qu'il leur était impossible d'apercevoir. Notre vue a plus d'étendue; et, quoiqu'ils connussent aussi bien que nous tout ce qu'ils pouvaient remarquer de la nature, ils n'en connaissaient pas tant néanmoins, et nous voyons plus qu'eux.Later in the 17th century, George Herbert, in his Jacula Prudentum (1651), wrote "A dwarf on a giant's shoulders sees farther of the two."
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, in The Friend (1828), wrote:

The dwarf sees farther than the giant, when he has the giant's shoulder to mount on.
Against this notion, Friedrich Nietzsche argues that a dwarf (the academic scholar) brings even the most sublime heights down to his level of understanding. In the section of Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1882) entitled "On the Vision and the Riddle", Zarathustra climbs to great heights with a dwarf on his shoulders to show him his greatest thought. Once there however, the dwarf fails to understand the profundity of the vision and Zarathustra reproaches him for "making things too easy on [him]self." If there is to be anything resembling "progress" in the history of philosophy, Nietzsche in "Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks" (1873) writes, it can only come from those rare giants among men, "each giant calling to his brother through the desolate intervals of time", an idea he got from Schopenhauer's work in Der handschriftliche Nachlass.

== Contemporary references ==
Robert King Merton, one of the 'founding fathers' of sociology, titled a book On the Shoulders of Giants: A Shandean Postscript. In it, he traces the history of Newton's famous comment "If I have seen farther, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants" back to centuries earlier, in the rambling style of Laurence Sterne's The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman.
NASA's official film of the Apollo 17 lunar landing mission was titled On the Shoulders of Giants.
R.E.M. references the phrase in the chorus of their song King Of Birds: "Standing on the shoulders of giants leaves me cold"
Umberto Eco writes in his 1980 novel The Name of the Rose, that Nicholas of Morimondo laments, "We no longer have the learning of the ancients, the age of giants is past!" To which the protagonist, William of Baskerville, replies: "We are dwarfs, but dwarfs who stand on the shoulders of those giants, and small though we are, we sometimes manage to see farther on the horizon than they."
The British two pound coin bears the inscription STANDING ON THE SHOULDERS OF GIANTS on its edge.
Standing on the Shoulder of Giants is the title of the fourth studio album by English rock band Oasis. The title was actually a misquote by Noel Gallagher after seeing the quote on the British two pound coin while in a pub.
Stephen Hawking stated: "Each generation stands on the shoulders of those who have gone before them, just as I did as a young PhD student in Cambridge, inspired by the work of Isaac Newton, James Clerk Maxwell and Albert Einstein." Additionally, Hawking wrote a book called On the Shoulders of Giants, which explores the major works of physics and astronomy that inspired him.
Google Scholar, a search engine for academic literature, displays the phrase "Stand on the shoulders of giants" below the search field.

== See also ==
Collective intelligence
Derivative work
Distributed cognition
Great Conversation
School of Chartres
Stigler's law of eponymy
William of Ockham's Razor

== References ==

== Further reading ==
Jeauneau, Édouard (1973). Lectio philosophorum: recherches sur l'Ecole de Chartres. Hakkert.
Jeauneau, Édouard (2009). Rethinking the School of Chartres. University of Toronto Press.
Merton, Robert King; Eco, Umberto; Donoghue, Denis (1993). On the shoulders of giants: a Shandean postscript. University of Chicago press.

== External links ==

Overview of history of the expression