Carolus Linnaeus Quotes

Nature does not proceed by leaps and bounds.

Nature herself has never attempted to effect great changes rapidly.

Nature does not make leaps.

Change is incremental and real change, enduring change, occurs one step at a time.

Even though you try very hard, the progress you make is always little by little. It is not like going out in a shower in which you know when you get wet. In a fog, you do not know you are getting wet, but as you keep walking you get wet little by little. If your mind has ideas of progress, you may say, 'Oh, this pace is terrible!' But actually it is not. When you get wet in a fog it is very difficult to dry yourself.

Know what's weird? Day by day, nothing seems to change. But pretty soon, everything's different.

Real change happens a step at a time.

… evolution over revolution.

Changes which are slow and gradual can be hard to notice even if their ultimate impact is quite dramatic.

Change is incremental. Change is small.

Whatever Nature undertakes, she can only accomplish it in a sequence. She never makes a leap.

Development comes from within. Nature does not hurry but advances slowly.

Growth is always a gradual process, a bridge slowly crossed and not a corner sharply turned.

Gradualism in theory is perpetuity in practice.

Progress is not accomplished in one stage.

Nothing is accomplished all at once, and it is one of my great maxims, and one of the most completely verified, that Nature makes no leaps: a maxim which I have called the law of continuity.

All the great and beneficent operations of Nature are produced by slow and often imperceptible degrees. The work of destruction and devastation only is violent and rapid.

I think continuity is a good thing. But change is sometimes good, too.

Almost all change is evolutionary, not revolutionary... expectations always travel at higher speeds.

The advance of science is not comparable to the changes of a city, where old edifices are pitilessly torn down to give place to new, but to the continuous evolution of zoologic types which develop ceaselessly and end by becoming unrecognisable to the common sight, but where an expert eye finds always traces of the prior work of the centuries past. One must not think then that the old-fashioned theories have been sterile and vain.

The new growth in the plant swelling against the sheath, which at the same time imprisons and protects it, must still be the truest type of progress.

It takes time for an acorn to turn into an oak, but the oak is already implied in the acorn.

As buds give rise by growth to fresh buds, and these, if vigorous, branch out and overtop on all sides many a feebler branch, so by generation I believe it has been with the great Tree of Life, which fills with its dead and broken branches the crust of the earth, and covers the surface with its ever branching and beautiful ramifications.

Your history is animal. Your future is divinity. Right now, you are like a pendulum, swinging between the two.

That's evolution. Evolution's always hard. Hard and bleak. No such thing as happy evolution