“And then he realized that he could never make anything out of the Unmaker, could never make the Unmaker do or be anything because it was only Undoing and Unbeing. It wasn’t the Unmaker he needed to call to, it was all the living things around him, the trees, the grass, the earth, the air itself. It was the greensong that he needed to restore.”

Cohens v. Virginia, 19 U.S. (6 Wheaton) 264, 387 (1821)

Variant: He who never makes a mistake never makes anything. It's part of learning the job.
Source: Revenge of the Witch

Hickey, The Express, 21 March 2005.
2000s, 2005

Source: Cannery Row

The Dominant Idea (1910)
Context: Let us have Men, Men who will say a word to their souls and keep it — keep it not when it is easy, but keep it when it is hard — keep it when the storm roars and there is a white-streaked sky and blue thunder before, and one's eyes are blinded and one's ears deafened with the war of opposing things; and keep it under the long leaden sky and the gray dreariness that never lifts. Hold unto the last: that is what it means to have a Dominant Idea, which Circumstance cannot break. And such men make and unmake Circumstance.

you ask. "Well, I'll get more," he says. Just as at cricket, you get more runs. There's no use in the runs, but to get more of them than other people is the game. So all that great foul city of London there, — rattling, growling, smoking, stinking, — a ghastly heap of fermenting brickwork, pouring out poison at every pore, — you fancy it is a city of work? Not a street of it! It is a great city of play; very nasty play and very hard play, but still play.

The Crown of Wild Olive, lecture I: Work, sections 23-24 (1866)

Letter to a Friend (circa 1656)

Marcello Lippi, September 2011 http://www.espnstar.com/football/serie-a/news/detail/item683056/%22Zidane-is-greatest-football-player%22/

Source: A Fire in the Sun (1989), Chapter 3 (p. 31).