“In all things success depends on previous preparation, and without such previous preparation there is sure to be failure.”

As quoted in The Leadership Secrets of Colin Powell (2003) by Oren Harari, p. 164.
2000s

Rogers Commission Report (1986)
Context: The acceptance and success of these flights is taken as evidence of safety. But erosion and blow-by are not what the design expected. They are warnings that something is wrong. The equipment is not operating as expected, and therefore there is a danger that it can operate with even wider deviations in this unexpected and not thoroughly understood way. The fact that this danger did not lead to a catastrophe before is no guarantee that it will not the next time, unless it is completely understood. When playing Russian roulette the fact that the first shot got off safely is little comfort for the next. The origin and consequences of the erosion and blow-by were not understood. They did not occur equally on all flights and all joints; sometimes more, and sometimes less. Why not sometime, when whatever conditions determined it were right, still more leading to catastrophe?
In spite of these variations from case to case, officials behaved as if they understood it, giving apparently logical arguments to each other often depending on the "success" of previous flights.

Source: Modern India and the Indians, 1878. in Shourie, Arun (1994). Missionaries in India: Continuities, changes, dilemmas. New Delhi : Rupa & Co, 1994

Source: Doing Virtuous Business (Thomas Nelson, 2011), p. 20.

The Conduct Of Life (1951)
Context: Now life is the only art that we are required to practice without preparation, and without being allowed the preliminary trials, the failures and botches, that are essential for the training of a mere beginner. In life, we must begin to give a public performance before we have acquired even a novice's skill; and often our moments of seeming mastery are upset by new demands, for which we have acquired no preparatory facility. Life is a score that we play at sight, not merely before we have divined the intentions of the composer, but even before we have mastered our instruments; even worse, a large part of the score has been only roughly indicated, and we must improvise the music for our particular instrument, over long passages. On these terms, the whole operation seems one of endless difficulty and frustration; and indeed, were it not for the fact that some of the passages have been played so often by our predecessors that, when we come to them, we seem to recall some of the score and can anticipate the natural sequence of the notes, we might often give up in sheer despair. The wonder is not that so much cacophony appears in our actual individual lives, but that there is any appearance of harmony and progression.

Source: The Life of Poetry (1949), p. 181
Context: The creation of a poem, or mathematical creation, involves so much sense of arrival, so much selection, so much of the desire that makes choice — even though one or more of these may operate in the unconscious or partly conscious work-periods before the actual work is achieved — that the questions raised are very pertinent.... The poet chooses and selects and has that sense of arrival as the poem ends; he is expressing what it feels like to arrive at his meanings. If he has expressed that well, his reader will arrive at his meanings. The degree of appropriateness of expression depends on the preparing. By preparing I mean allowing the reader to feel the interdependences, the relations, within the poem.
These inter-dependences may be proved, if you will allow the term, in one or more ways: the music by which the syllables resolve may lead to a new theme, as in a verbal music, or to a climax, a key-relationship which makes — for the moment — an equilibrium; the images may have established their own progression in such a way that they serve to mark the poem’s development; the tensions and attractions between the poem’s meanings may mark its growth, as they must if the poem is to achieve its form.
A poem is an imaginary work, living in time, indicated in language. It is and it expresses; it allows us to express.

See You at the Top (2000)

As quoted in Sophia's Fire (2005) by Sango Mbella, p. 133.