"Nature herself has never attempted to effect great changes rapidly"
About this Quote
Quintilian’s line is the kind of calm-sounding maxim that quietly bullies you into patience. By invoking “Nature herself,” he borrows the highest available authority in the Roman imagination: not a god with moods, but the steady, impersonal order of things. The trick is how “never” and “great” work together. “Never” shuts down the fantasy of shortcuts; “great” flatters the reader into believing their ambition counts as world-altering. If you want something significant, he implies, you must accept the timetable that significance demands.
The intent is pedagogical, but also political. Quintilian is writing as an educator in an empire that prized disciplined formation - of citizens, speakers, administrators - and distrusted volatility. In the Institutio Oratoria, his larger project is to defend slow cultivation: the orator is not manufactured by hacks, drills, or flashy tricks, but grown through years of training, moral development, and practice. “Attempted to effect” is doing subtle work, too: even if Nature wanted to rush, she wouldn’t try. Impatience isn’t just impractical; it’s unnatural, a kind of arrogance.
The subtext lands squarely on educational fads and rhetorical gimmicks. Quintilian is arguing against the seductive marketplace promise that excellence can be compressed into a quick curriculum. His sentence makes gradualism feel like realism rather than ideology: time isn’t an obstacle to greatness; it’s the medium in which greatness becomes legible.
The intent is pedagogical, but also political. Quintilian is writing as an educator in an empire that prized disciplined formation - of citizens, speakers, administrators - and distrusted volatility. In the Institutio Oratoria, his larger project is to defend slow cultivation: the orator is not manufactured by hacks, drills, or flashy tricks, but grown through years of training, moral development, and practice. “Attempted to effect” is doing subtle work, too: even if Nature wanted to rush, she wouldn’t try. Impatience isn’t just impractical; it’s unnatural, a kind of arrogance.
The subtext lands squarely on educational fads and rhetorical gimmicks. Quintilian is arguing against the seductive marketplace promise that excellence can be compressed into a quick curriculum. His sentence makes gradualism feel like realism rather than ideology: time isn’t an obstacle to greatness; it’s the medium in which greatness becomes legible.
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