Slow Transformation Quotes

It took Hong Kong 100 years to become what it is.

Nature herself has never attempted to effect great changes rapidly.

In politics one should not expect big jumps. Everything takes time.

Remember the movements that don't look like moving.

Tectonic shifts in American politics take time—often a long time.

… evolution over revolution.

When heart is open, you will change just like a flower slowly opening.

Nature does not proceed by leaps and bounds.

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

Trying to describe the process of becoming an alcoholic is like trying to describe air. It's too big and mysterious and pervasive to be defined. Alcohol is everywhere in your life, omnipresent, and you're both aware and unaware of it almost all the time, all you know is you'd die without it, and there is no simple reason why this happens, no single moment, no physiological event that pushes a heavy drinker across a concrete line into alcoholism. It's a slow, gradual, insidious, elusive becoming.

The reform and opening up of China hasn't been happening quite the way we've been told, like a small bird breaking out of its egg. Its more like a cicada shedding its skin, emerging ever so slowly. Energy is the last part of that shell that needs to be shed.

It's not unusual to find big political shifts that take place beneath the surface before they're visible above the surface.

I am always for change. But I believe in slow and inevitable change and not a forced one, all of a sudden.

I'm an advocate of evolutionary, not revolutionary, changes.

I like less the story that a frog if put in cold water will not bestir itself if that water is heated up slowly and gradually and will in the end let itself be killed, boiled alive, too comfortable with continuity to realize that continuous change at some point may become intolerable and demand a change in behaviour.

Real change happens a step at a time.

People don’t get radicalized overnight. It’s a process that takes 3 or 4 years.

When it comes to religion today, we tend to be long on butterflies and short on cocoons. Somehow we're going to have to relearn that the deep things of God don't come suddenly.

When change takes place gradually, it's difficult to comprehend its meaning.

. . . the enemy of righteousness also works in little steps, so small that they are hard to notice if you are thinking only about yourself and how great you are. Just as truth is given to us line upon line and the light brightens slowly as we obey, even so, as we disobey our testimony of truth lessens almost imperceptibly, little by little, and darkness descends so slowly that the proud may easily deny that anything is changing.

A different image came to me a few weeks ago. The unknown thing to be known appeared to me as some stretch of earth or hard marl, resisting penetration... the sea advances insensibly in silence, nothing seems to happen, nothing moves, the water is so far off you hardly hear it... yet finally it surrounds the resistant substance.

The heart changes...but we learn of it only from reading or by imagination; for in reality its alteration, like that of certain natural phenomena, is so gradual that, even if we are able to distinguish, successively, each of its different states, we are still spared the actual sensation of change.

The habits that took years to build, do not take a day to change.

It's funny how things change slowly, until the day we realize they've changed completely.

A lot of the changes are so gradual that they don't even qualify as news, or even as interesting: they're so mundane that we just take them for granted. But history shows that it's the mundane changes that are more important than the dramatic 'newsworthy' events.