Frithjof Schuon (1907–1998) Swiss philosopher
[2012, Echoes of Perennial Wisdom, World Wisdom, 38, 978-1-93659700-0]
God, Beauty
Breakfast of Champions (1973)
Context: I was on par with the Creator of the Universe there in the dark in the cocktail lounge. I shrunk the Universe to a ball exactly one light-year in diameter. I had it explode. I had it disperse itself again.
Ask me a question, any question. How old is the Universe? It is one half-second old, but the half-second has lasted one quintillion years so far. Who created it? Nobody created it. It has always been here.
What is time? It is a serpent which eats its tail, like this:
This is the snake which uncoiled itself long enough to offer Eve the apple, which looked like this:
What was the apple which Eve and Adam ate? It was the Creator of the Universe.
And so on.
Symbols can be so beautiful, sometimes.
Frithjof Schuon (1907–1998) Swiss philosopher
[2012, Echoes of Perennial Wisdom, World Wisdom, 38, 978-1-93659700-0]
God, Beauty
“Beauty lay not in the thing, but in what the thing symbolized.”
Thomas Hardy (1840–1928) English novelist and poet
Source: Tess of the D'Urbervilles
S. I. Hayakawa book Language in Thought and Action
Source: Language in Thought and Action (1949), Language as Symbolism, p. 27
“The blush is beautiful, but it is sometimes inconvenient.”
Carlo Goldoni (1707–1794) Italian playwright and librettist
Bello è il rossore, ma è incommodo qualche volta.
I. 3.
Pamela (c. 1750)