Joseph Butler Quotes

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

Nature proceeds little by little from things lifeless to animal life in such a way that it is impossible to determine the exact line ure hath made one world, and art another. In brief, all things are artificial; for nature is the Art of God.

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.

Nature does not proceed by leaps and bounds.

Everything comes gradually and at its appointed hour.

All advances by degrees in Nature, and nothing by leaps …. Although there may exist in some other world species intermediate between Man and the Apes, Nature has thought it is to remove them from us, in order to establish our superiority beyond question. I speak of intermediate species, and by no means limit myself to those leading to Man.

What the evolutionist believes, on the basis of a mass of what seems to him un-refuted and irrefutable scientific evidence, is that the plants and animals and man and woman were not created by some sudden supernatural treatment of clay and ribs, but that they have slowly and gradually come into existence through the orderly processes of Nature extending over much time. He sees a fine and awe-inspiring order throughout Nature, some of which can be discovered and, in a measure, understood. He sees in this order, this immense capacity for natural being and doing and becoming, a beauty and majesty in Nature which cannot be transcended in conception. In recognizing the creation of man as its supreme achievement, he sees no belittling of man, but a proof of the extraordinary potentialities of this natural order. In organic evolution he sees just what the name signifies, the unfolding of organized matter, the outrolling of the possibilities of life.

Everything in the world is conducted by gradual process. This seems to be the great principle of harmony in the universe.

I think the best things are the ones that happen organically and take a while because nothing really happens overnight if you think about it.

I've been building slow, step by step.

I believe in taking things slow, one step at a time.

It does not happen all at once. There is no instant pudding.

To those who study her, Nature reveals herself as extraordinarily fertile and ingenious in devising means, but she has no ends which the human mind has been able to discover or comprehend.

We are not to suppose, that there is any violent exertion of power, such as is required in order to produce a great event in little time; in nature, we find no deficiency in respect of time, nor any limitation with regard to power. But time is not made to flow in vain; nor does there ever appear the exertion of superfluous power, or the manifestation of design, not calculated in wisdom to effect some general end.

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.

The fact that - I mean, these are things to be talked about. You can't do anything without educating the public, right? And that's a slow work.

Nature never hurries: atom by atom, little by little, she achieves her work. The lesson one learns from yachting or planting is the manners of Nature; patience with the delays of wind and sun, delays of the seasons, bad weather, excess or lack of water.

Beneficent spirals, operating by benign feedback, mean that everything needful is not required at once: each individual improvement is beneficial for the whole

Small daily improvements over time lead to stunning results.

It is impossible to do everything people want you to do. You have just enough time to do God’s will. If you can’t get it all done, it means you’re trying to do more than God intended for you to do.

What the ordinary person means by a 'miracle' is some gross distortion or suspension of the laws of nature... but life itself strikes him as commonplace, when in truth a blade of grass or a neuron in the brain is a greater miracle.

Nature . . . is inexorable and immutable; she never transgresses the laws imposed upon her, nor cares a whit whether her abstruse reasons and methods of operations are understandable to men.

There is a time when the word "eventually" has the soothing effect of a promise, and a time when the word evokes in us bitterness and scorn.

You and I must not complain if our plans break down if we have done our part. That probably means that the plans of One who knows more than we do have succeeded.

You cannot force spiritual things. A testimony is not thrust upon you; it grows. And a testimony is a testimony, and it should be respected, whether it is small or large. We become taller in our testimony like we grow in physical stature and hardly know it is happening, because it comes by growth.