"If a thing is worth doing it is worth doing badly."

[Robert Louis] Stevenson's experiments in these things [i.e., wood engraving and writing music, which he was not very good at] arose from a splendid scorn for that most false and contemptible of maxims, the statement that if a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing well. Stevenson was one of the few modern philosophers who realized the essential truth that a thing is good in its quality, and not only in its perfection. If music and wood engraving are really good things they must be good even to the disciple and the fool. If an invention is marvellous and beneficient, it must be worth beholding even partially and through a glass darkly. If a thing is worth doing it is worth doing badly.

-Ocotber 18, 1901, London Daily News