The insufficient practice was part of the test; one must come to the understanding in the end that one was always insufficiently practiced, and yet one must sometimes act anyway. Practice itself was an act.

Range of Ghosts
Elizabeth Bear

What are the facts? Again and again and again - what are the facts? Shun wishful thinking, ignore divine revelation, forget what “the stars foretell,” avoid opinion, care not what the neighbors think, never mind the unguessable “verdict of history” - what are the facts, and to how many decimal places? You pilot always into an unknown future; facts ( Read more... )

... Nay, if you come to that, Sir, have not the wisest of men in all ages, not excepting Solomon himself,-have they not had their Hobby-Horses;-their running horses,-their coins and their cockle-shells, their drums and their trumpets, their fiddles, their pallets,-their maggots and their butterflies?-and so long as a man rides his Hobby-Horse ( Read more... )