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.)
“To reach and appreciate the true beauty of life, one always comes from hell.”
Original: Per raggiungere ed apprezzare la vera bellezza della vita, si proviene sempre da un inferno.
Source: prevale.net
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“One cannot reach paradise by creating Hell for others”
Morning Edition with Jacki Northam, National Public Radio, September 8, 2006, http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5786976
[4] Symbol
Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language (1984)
Context: What is a symbol? Etymologically speaking, the word σύμβολον comes from σνμβάλλω, to throw-with, to make something coincide with something else: a symbol was originally an identification mark made up of two halves of a coin or of a medal. Two halves of the same thing, either one standing for the other, both becoming, however, fully effective only when they matched to make up, again, the original whole. … in the original concept of symbol, there is the suggestion of a final recomposition. Etymologies, however, do not necessarily tell the truth — or, at least, they tell the truth, in terms of historical, not of structural, semantics. What is frequently appreciated in many so-called symbols is exactly their vagueness, their openness, their fruitful ineffectiveness to express a 'final' meaning, so that with symbols and by symbols one indicates what is always beyond one's reach.
Misattributed
Source: Hermann Weyl as quoted by Freeman Dyson: "Characteristic of Weyl was an aesthetic sense which dominated his thinking on all subjects. He once said to me, half-joking, 'My work always tried to unite the true with the beautiful; but when I had to choose one or the other, I usually chose the beautiful.'" - Freeman Dyson, "Obituary of Hermann Weyl," Nature (1956-03-10), pp. 457-458.
Epilogue (p. 687)
The Dragon in the Sword (1986)
“True beauty is always oddly surprising.”
Book Three, Part II “The Edge of the Sea”, Chapter 2 (p. 353)
The Birthgrave (1975)
Source: Memoirs Of A Bird In A Gilded Cage (1969), CHAPTER 3, The truth squad, p. 36
“What is really beautiful must always be true.”
Ce qui est fort beau est nécessairement toujours vrai.
Source: Armance (1827), Ch. 6