The quote below is from Isaac Newton, by James Gleick.

"I don't know what I may seem to the world, 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

While the fact is that Newton has never played as a boy or a grownup on the seashore. He only understood the sea by abstraction and computation. Such was the genius in him and such is the power of the tool(calculus) he developed.

This books seems to be a good read.