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Somehow this comparison just popped in to my head, and to me it speaks deeply to the idea that life by its very nature is contradictory, and that what might seem like brilliant advice in one situation can in fact be downright disastrous advice in another situation.
Which reminds me of a certain phrase that I utterly loathe:
"Everything happens for a reason!"
Feck, no it doesn't. To me, most things happen for a slew of reasons, many of them inscrutable and/or unknown. But we naked apes like order, we do, so we like to oversimplify, rationalize, and normalize whenever possible. Even to the genesis of religious belief, dare I say it.
Anyway yeah, got some contradictory advice / quotes?
One I encounter at work fairly frequently is "Don't let perfect be the enemy of the good" and "If you don't have time to do it twice, do it right the first time".
The reality is that you need to develop a sense for when you're just spinning your wheels trying to anticipate anything and everything possible, and pit that against the desire to just call something done because it looks like it works in a carefully controlled test situation and you want to move on.
Some things you're only going to catch after letting your idea/plan/program come into contact with reality, but some things are also far better to plan for in advance.
So you just keep adjusting your "ceiling" and "floor" for how far you go when designing shit, and eventually you build a sense for it.