Variously moulded and often differently handled

After re-reading this, it's hard not to blush about internet shopping.  And e-bay.  Hmm.

"Though it may be unessential to the imagination, travel is necessary to an understanding of men.  Only with long experience and the opening of his wares on many a beach where his language is not spoken, will the merchant come to know the worth of what he carries, and what is parochial and what is universal in his choice.  Such delicate goods as justice, love and honour, courtesy, and indeed all the things we care for, are valid everywhere; but they are variously moulded and often differently handled, and sometimes nearly unrecognizable if you meet them in a foreign land; and the art of learning fundamental common values is perhaps the greatest gain of travel to those who wish to live at ease among their fellows." 

Freya Stark, Perseus in the Wind, retold by John Julius Norwich in "A Christmas Cracker" in 2007.

Guessing what is at “the other side of the hill”

“All the business of war, and indeed all the business of life, is to endeavour to find out what you don’t know by what you do; that’s what I called ‘guessing what was at the other side of the hill.’”  

So said the Duke of Wellington.  I have misquoted this so often that I am finally at pains to write it down properly.  I have mistakenly used the “other side of the hill” analogy to counter the business challenge that there lies a squadron of enthusiastic buyers of one’s products, all waiting out there, but they remain annoyingly unidentified and unapproached.    

Yet no matter how many missions are sent galloping over the proverbial hill, sometimes there just aren’t more mystery buyers to unearth.  Beyond the hill is sometimes just more uninhabited land.  

The proper quotation is more profound than my misreading of it.  I do like the Duke for acknowledging we use what we know to find out what don’t – a pretty fragile basis but it is all that we poor humans have.   Past knowledge might be the only guide to the future, to paraphrase.