Life & Wisdom Quote by Arthur Ransome

Ransome’s line is a small manifesto disguised as practical advice: a brisk refusal of the romantic idea that you can keep revising yesterday into something you can live with. “When a thing’s done, it’s done” lands like a slammed door. The repetition isn’t poetic flourish; it’s discipline. It insists on finality, the kind that separates responsible action from endless self-justification. Then he pivots: “if it’s not done right, do it differently next time.” Not redo it now, not wallow in regret, not litigate intentions. Learn, adjust, move.

The subtext is about agency under constraint. Ransome isn’t preaching perfectionism; he’s inoculating against it. “Right” matters, but he doesn’t define it, which is the point: standards shift with experience, and the only honest place to apply new standards is the future. That’s a quietly anti-melodramatic worldview, the tone of someone who’s seen how people get stuck trying to repair their own narratives instead of improving their habits.

Context helps. Ransome wrote adventure stories (Swallows and Amazons) where competence is earned through trial, error, and the humility to adapt. He also lived through wars and political turbulence; in a century of irreversible decisions, there’s a hard-earned realism here. The line offers a moral economy: accept the cost of a mistake, then cash it in as information. It works because it’s unsentimental and forward-facing, a clean break from the comforting fiction that you can always tidy up the past if you worry at it long enough.