“Nature is but a name for an effect,
Whose cause is God.”

On the Nature of Places, a continuation of the treatise On Lines, Angles and Figures as quoted by Amelia Carolina Sparavigna, "Translation and discussion of the De Iride, a treatise on optics by Robert Grosseteste" arXiv:1211.5961v1 http://arxiv.org/abs/1211.5961 @arXiv.org, Cornell University (2012)
Context: The diligent investigator of natural phenomena can give the causes of all natural effects... by the rules and roots and foundations given from the power of geometry.

Source: Man's Vision of God and the Logic of Theism (1941), P. 347.

as quoted in "The man who got it right," The New York Review of Books, Volume 60, Number 13, August 15, 2013, p. 72

Science and Spirit interview (2004)

De Lineas, Anguilis et Figuris (On Lines, Angles and Figures) as quoted in Neil Lewis, "Robert Grosseteste" http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/grosseteste/ Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2007, 2013) citing Baur, Ludwig (ed.) Die Philosophischen Werke des Robert Grosseteste, Bischofs von Lincoln (1912) pp.59–60
Context: The consideration of lines, angles and figures is of the greatest utility since it is impossible for natural philosophy to be known without them... All causes of natural effects have to be given through lines, angles and figures, for otherwise it is impossible for the reason why (propter quid) to be known in them.

[In the Company of the Holy Mother, 68]

Aphorism 3
Novum Organum (1620), Book I

in
Context: If one was sometimes led astray by trying to simplify the elements of a science, it is because one has established systems before putting together a fairly large number of facts. Some assumption, which would be very simple when one considers only a class of phenomena, requires many other assumptions if one wants to leave the narrow circle in which we had initially withdrawn. If nature has offered to produce the maximum effect with minimum causes, it is in all of its laws that it had to solve this major problem. It is without doubt difficult to discover the foundations of this wonderful economy, i. e. the simplest causes of phenomena considered from such a wide point of view. But if this general principle of the philosophy of physics does not lead immediately to the knowledge of truth, it can direct the efforts of the human spirit, by leading it away from theories which relate the phenomena to too many different causes, and by adopting preferably those based on the smallest number of assumptions, which show to be more fruitful in consequences.

The Principles of Success in Literature (1865)
Context: Literature is at once the cause and the effect of social progress. It deepens our natural sensibilities, and strengthens by exercise our intellectual capacities. It stores up the accumulated experience of the race, connecting Past and Present into a conscious unity; and with this store it feeds successive generations, to be fed in turn by them. As its importance emerges into more general recognition, it necessarily draws after it a larger crowd of servitors, filling noble minds with a noble ambition.