
“Nature never makes blunders; when she makes a fool she means it.”
Affurisms. From Josh Billings: His Sayings (1865)
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.
Misattributed
“Nature never makes blunders; when she makes a fool she means it.”
Affurisms. From Josh Billings: His Sayings (1865)
Honesty
The Note-Books of Samuel Butler (1912), Part VIII - Handel and Music
“You never get a second chance to make a good first impression.”
Misattributed
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)
“The only person who never makes mistakes is the person who never does anything.”
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.”
Loving What Is: Four Questions That Can Change Your Life (2002)