in honest ignorance we must act

I thought of courage and of cowardice, and how we are all brave and terrified each in our own way and our private changing proportion, and I thought of honesty and deception, and the dance of life they make, for it is exactly when we come closest to another that we are turned away with a lie, and blunder forward on a misconception, moving to understand ourselves on the platitudes and lies of the past. And, vaguely, thinking of certain words not as words but as the serious divisions of my experience, and every man's experience is serious to himself, I thought of such couples as love and hate, and victory and defeat, and what it was to feel warm and what it was to be cool ... but I knew that finally one must do, simply do, for we act in total ignorance and yet in honest ignorance we must act, or we can never learn for we can hardly believe what we are told, we can only measure what has happened inside ourselves.

-Norman Mailer