“Nature never makes blunders; when she makes a fool she means it.”
Josh Billings (1818–1885) American humorist
Affurisms. From Josh Billings: His Sayings (1865)
“Success does not consist in never making blunders, but in never making the same one a second time.”
H. W. Shaw (Josh Billings), as quoted in Scientific American, Vol. 31 (1874), p. 121, and in dictionaries of quotations such as Excellent Quotations for Home and School (1890) by Julia B. Hoitt, p. 117 https://archive.org/stream/excellentquotat00hoitgoog/excellentquotat00hoitgoog#page/n138/mode/1up and Many Thoughts of Many Minds: A Treasury of Quotations from the Literature of Every Land and Every Age (1896) by Louis Klopsch, p. 266 https://archive.org/stream/manythoughtsman00klopgoog/manythoughtsman00klopgoog#page/n268/mode/1up. <br class="br">Misattributed
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George Bernard Shaw413
Irish playwright 1856–1950Related quotes
Samuel Butler (1835–1902) novelist
Honesty
The Note-Books of Samuel Butler (1912), Part VIII - Handel and Music
“There is never a second opportunity to make a first impression.”
Andrzej Sapkowski book Sword of Destiny
Source: Sword of Destiny
“You never get a second chance to make a good first impression.”
Will Rogers (1879–1935) American humorist and entertainer
Misattributed
Carlos Castaneda book The Wheel of Time
Source: The Wheel of Time: Shamans of Ancient Mexico, Their Thoughts About Life, Death and the Universe], (1998), Quotations from The Teachings of Don Juan (Chapter 4)
Octavio Paz (1914–1998) Mexican writer laureated with the 1990 Nobel Prize for Literature
Source: The Monkey Grammarian (1974), Ch. 4
Context: Since movement is a metaphor for change, the best thing will be to say: nonchange is (always) change. It would appear that I have finally arrived at the desired disequilibrium. Nonetheless, change is not the primordial, original word that I am searching for: it is a form of becoming. When becoming is substituted for change, the relation between the two terms is altered, so that I am obliged to replace nonchange by permanence, which is a metaphor for fixity, as becoming is for coming-to-be, which in turn is a metaphor for time in all its ceaseless transformations…. There is no beginning, no original word: each one is a metaphor for another word which is a metaphor for yet another, and so on. All of them are translations of translations. A transparency in which the obverse is the reverse: fixity is always momentary.
I begin all over again: if it does not make sense to say that fixity is always momentary, the same may not be true if I say that it never is.
“We never make a decision. When the time is right, the decision makes itself.”
Byron Katie (1942) American spiritual writer
Loving What Is: Four Questions That Can Change Your Life (2002)
