variety

• is restful

48:6.37You will learn that you in­crease your bur­dens and de­crease the like­li­hood of suc­cess by tak­ing your­self too se­ri­ously. Noth­ing can take prece­dence over the work of your sta­tus sphere—this world or the next. Very im­por­tant is the work of prepa­ra­tion for the next higher sphere, but noth­ing equals the im­por­tance of the work of the world in which you are ac­tu­ally liv­ing. But though the work is im­por­tant, the self is not. When you feel im­por­tant, you lose en­ergy to the wear and tear of ego dig­nity so that there is lit­tle en­ergy left to do the work. Self-im­por­tance, not work-im­por­tance, ex­hausts im­ma­ture crea­tures; it is the self el­e­ment that ex­hausts, not the ef­fort to achieve. You can do im­por­tant work if you do not be­come self-im­por­tant; you can do sev­eral things as eas­ily as one if you leave your­self out. Va­ri­ety is rest­ful; mo­not­ony is what wears and ex­hausts. Day af­ter day is alike—just life or the al­ter­na­tive of death.

• essential to concept of beauty

56:10.3Phi­los­o­phy you some­what grasp, and di­vin­ity you com­pre­hend in wor­ship, so­cial ser­vice, and per­sonal spir­i­tual ex­pe­ri­ence, but the pur­suit of beauty—cos­mol­ogy—you all too of­ten limit to the study of man’s crude artis­tic en­deav­ors. Beauty, art, is largely a mat­ter of the uni­fi­ca­tion of con­trasts. Va­ri­ety is es­sen­tial to the con­cept of beauty. The su­preme beauty, the height of fi­nite art, is the drama of the uni­fi­ca­tion of the vast­ness of the cos­mic ex­tremes of Cre­ator and crea­ture. Man find­ing God and God find­ing man—the crea­ture be­com­ing per­fect as is the Cre­ator—that is the su­per­nal achieve­ment of the su­premely beau­ti­ful, the at­tain­ment of the apex of cos­mic art.

• indispensable for natural selection

64:6.311. Va­ri­ety is in­dis­pens­able to op­por­tu­nity for the wide func­tion­ing of nat­u­ral se­lec­tion, dif­fer­en­tial sur­vival of su­pe­rior strains.