“By interlinking causes, by searching always for unity in the face of superficial diversity, modern scientific explanations prize depth above breadth. A deep and narrow theory can, and often does, graduate to become a deep and broad one. A broad and shallow theory never does.”

Sec. 126; variant translation: Mystical explanations are thought to be deep; the truth is that they are not even shallow.
The Gay Science (1882)

Section 5, “Food , Book Reviews, Sports, Obituaries” Introduction (p. 169)
A Mathematician Reads the Newspaper (1995)

Source: The Fabric of Reality (1997), Ch. 10

Source: Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea: Why the Greeks Matter (2003), Ch.VII The Way They Went: Greco-Roman Meets Judeo-Christian
Context: No longer did philosophers aspire to the deep spiritual insights and broad moral vision of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. They divided into conflicting schools and wandered through the Greco-Roman world as permanent immigrants, picking up tutoring jobs as they could.... the upshot was a debased intellectual climate, fragmented and agnostic.

Source: Utopia (1516), Ch. 1 : Discourses of Raphael Hythloday, of the Best State of a Commonwealth
Context: The island of Utopia is in the middle two hundred miles broad, and holds almost at the same breadth over a great part of it, but it grows narrower towards both ends. Its figure is not unlike a crescent. Between its horns the sea comes in eleven miles broad, and spreads itself into a great bay, which is environed with land to the compass of about five hundred miles, and is well secured from winds. In this bay there is no great current; the whole coast is, as it were, one continued harbour, which gives all that live in the island great convenience for mutual commerce. But the entry into the bay, occasioned by rocks on the one hand and shallows on the other, is very dangerous. In the middle of it there is one single rock which appears above water, and may, therefore, easily be avoided; and on the top of it there is a tower, in which a garrison is kept; the other rocks lie under water, and are very dangerous. The channel is known only to the natives; so that if any stranger should enter into the bay without one of their pilots he would run great danger of shipwreck.

Die Zahlentheorie ist nützlich, weil man mit ihr promovieren kann.
Foreword to Vorlesungen über Zahlentheorie (Lectures on Number Theory) (1927).

Source: Dune