“Why should we think upon things that are lovely Because thinking determines life. It is a common habit to blame life upon the environment. Environment modifies life but does not govern life. The soul is stronger than its surroundings.”

Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems and the Economic World (1995)

"The Man Who Named the World" (1990)

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 210.

Source: Father and Child Reunion (2001), p. 137.

Letter to Sister Mary James Power (1 October 1934); published in The Wild God of the World : An Anthology of Robinson Jeffers (2003), edited by Albert Gelpi, p. 189 - 190
Context: I think that one may contribute (ever so slightly) to the beauty of things by making one's own life and environment beautiful, as far as one's power reaches. This includes moral beauty, one of the qualities of humanity, though it seems not to appear elsewhere in the universe. But I would have each person realize that his contribution is not important, its success not really a matter for exultation nor its failure for mourning; the beauty of things is sufficient without him.
(An office of tragic poetry is to show that there is beauty in pain and failure as much as in success and happiness.)

Source: The Canterville Ghost

Variant: A change of environment is the traditional fallacy upon which doomed loves, and lungs, rely.
Source: Lolita