Some summary quotes

"you [God] ordered all things by measure, number, weight.”
Wisdom 11:21

That their hearts may be comforted, being instructed in charity and unto all riches of fulness of understanding, unto the knowledge of the mystery of God the Father and of Christ Jesus: In whom are hid all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge.
[Col 2:3, cf. Litany of the Sacred Heart]

"Eternities"

I cannot count the pebbles in the brook.
Well hath He spoken: 'Swear not by thy head,
Thou knowest not the hairs,' though He, we read,
Writes that wild number in His own strange book.

I cannot count the sands or search the seas,
Death cometh, and I leave so much untrod.
Grant my immortal aureole, O my God,
And I will name the leaves upon the trees.

In heaven I shall stand on gold and glass,
Still brooding earth's arithmetic to spell;
Or see the fading of the fires of hell
Ere I have thanked my God for all the grass.
Chesterton, Collected Poems



"Liberal Education, viewed in itself, is simply the cultivation of the intellect, as such, and its object is nothing more or less than intellectual excellence."
Newman, Idea of a University

"The rebuilding of this bridge between science and human nature is one of the greatest needs of mankind."
Chesterton, The Defendant

...if you drop any science out of the circle of knowledge, you cannot keep its place vacant for it; that science is forgotten; the other sciences close up, or, in other words, they exceed their proper bounds, and intrude where they have no right. For instance, I suppose, if ethics were sent into banishment, its territory would soon disappear, under a treaty of partition, as it may be called, between law, political economy, and physiology; what, again, would become of the province of experimental science, if made over to the Antiquarian Society; or of history, if surrendered out and out to Metaphysicians? The case is the same with the subject-matter of Theology; it would be the prey of a dozen various sciences, if Theology were put out of possession; and not only so, but those sciences would be plainly exceeding their rights and their capacities in seizing upon it. They would be sure to teach wrongly, where they had no mission to teach at all. The enemies of Catholicism ought to be the last to deny this: - for they have never been blind to a like usurpation, as they have called it, on the part of theologians; those who accuse us of wishing, in accordance with Scripture language, to make the sun go round the earth, are not the men to deny that a science which exceeds its limits falls into error.
Newman, Idea of a University

"One of the severest tests of the scientific mind is to know the limits of the legitimate application of the scientific method."
J. C. Maxwell, The Scientific Papers of James Clerk Maxwell

"Those who devote their lives to the purpose of proving that there is no purpose, constitute an interesting subject for study."
A. N. Whitehead The Function of Reason

"Science cannot do a very large number of things, and to assume that science may find a technical solution to all problems is the road to disaster."
Polykarp Kusch, a Nobel-laureate physicist, Address to the Pulitzer Prize jurors, Columbia University, 1961, in New York Herald Tribune, April 2, 1961, sec. 2, p. 3. col. 5.

"History is philosophy teaching by examples." A phrase of Thucydides, recalled by Dionysus of Halicarnassus in his Ars rhetorica, XI, 2.