Aldo Leopold quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Aldo Leopold

Aldo Leopold Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Aldo Leopold on Wise Famous Quotes.

The land-relation is still strictly economic, entailing privileges but not obligations

Man brings all things to the test of himself, and this is notably true of lightning.

It is in midwinter that I sometimes glean from my pines ... a curious transfusion of courage.

Only the most uncritical minds are free from doubt.

We face the question whether a still higher "standard of living" is worth its cost in things natural, wild, and free.

One swallow does not make a summer, but one skein of geese, cleaving the murk of a March thaw, is the spring.

Conservation is a positive exercise of skill and insight, not merely a negative exercise of abstinence and caution.

Hemispheric solidarity is new among statesmen, but not among the feathered navies of the sky.

Your woodlot is, in fact, an historical document which faithfully records your personal philosophy.

Wilderness, then, assumes unexpected importance as a laboratory for the study of land - health.

The modern dogma is comfort at any cost.

At first blush I am tempted to conclude that a satisfactory hobby must be in large degree useless, inefficient, laborious, or irrelevant.

Land is not merely soil, it is a fountain of energy flowing through a circuit of soils, plants and animals.

There is time not only to see who has done what, but to speculate why.

There are some who can live without wild things and some who cannot.

Conservation will ultimately boil down to rewarding the private landowner who conserves the public interest.

What the youth needs to be told is that a ship is a-building in his own mental dry dock, a ship with freedom of the seas.

No farmer-sportsman group is stronger than the ties of mutual confidence and enthusiasm which bind its members.

The oldest task in human history: to live on a piece of land without spoiling it.

O, God assist our side: at least, avoid assisting the enemy and leave the rest to me

The richest values of wilderness lie not in the days of Daniel Boone, nor even in the present, but rather in the future.

Keeping records enhances the pleasure of the search and the chance of finding order and meaning in these events.

Recreational development is a job not of building roads into the lovely country, but of building receptivity into the still unlovely human mind.

A conservationist is one who is humbly aware that with each stroke [of the axe] he is writing his signature on the face of the land.

The most fun lies in seeing and studying the unknown.

Six days shalt thou paddle and pack, but on the seventh thou shall wash thy socks.

Is education possibly a process of trading awareness for things of lesser worth?

I am glad I will not be young in a future without wilderness.

What avail are forty freedoms without a blank spot on the map?

The boundary between tame and wild exists only in the imperfections of the human mind.

We grieve only for what we know.

A peculiar virtue in wildlife ethics is that the hunter ordinarily has no gallery to applaud or disapprove of his conduct

The outstanding scientific discovery of the twentieth century is not television, or radio, but rather the complexity of the land organism.

Having to squeeze the last drop of utility out of the land has the same desperate finality as having to chop up the furniture to keep warm.

Only economists mistake physical opulence for riches.

Relegating grizzlies to Alaska is about like relegating happiness heaven; one may never get there.

What a dull world if we knew all about geese!

Wilderness is the raw material out of which man has hammered the artifact called civilization.

Land health is the capacity for self-renewal in the soils, waters, plants, and animals that collectively comprise the land.

Education, I fear, is learning to see one thing by going blind to another.

Conservation is a state of harmony between men and land.

Wildflower corners are easy to maintain, but once gone, they are hard to rebuild.

I love all trees, but I am in love with pines.

To those devoid of imagination a blank place on the map is a useless waste; to others, the most valuable part.

Health is the capacity of the land for self-renewal.

Relegating conservation to government is like relegating virtue to the Sabbath. Turns over to professionals what should be daily work of amateurs .

No important change in ethics was ever accomplished without an internal chage in our intellectual emphasis, loyalties, affections, and convictions.

The life of every river sings its own song, but in most the song is long marred by the discords of misuse.

I am convinced that most Americans of the new generation have no idea what a decent forest looks like. The only way to tell them is to show them.

That land is a community is the basic concept of ecology, but that land is to be loved and respected is an extension of ethics.

It is part of wisdom never to revisit a wilderness, for the more golden the lily, the more certain that someone has gilded it.

Wilderness is the very stuff America is made of.

Too much safety seems to yield only danger in the long run,

To look into the eyes of a wolf is to see your own soul - hope you like what you see.

In June as many as a dozen species may burst their buds on a single day. No man can heed all of these anniversaries; no man can ignore all of them.

The rich diversity of the world's cultures reflects a corresponding diversity in the wilds that gave them birth.

Prudence never kindled a fire in the human mind; I have no hope for conservation born of fear.

To build a road is so much simpler than to think of what the country really needs.

The good life of any river may depend on the perception of its music; and the preservation of some music to perceive.

In country, as in people, a plain exterior often conceals
hidden riches, to perceive which requires much living in and with.

In our attempt to make conservation easy, we have made it trivial.

Nonconformity is the highest evolutionary attainment of social animals.

Never had there been so rare a day, or so rich a solitude top spend it in.

A river or stream is a cycle of energy from sun to plants to insects to fish. It is a continuum broken only by humans.

That the situation appears hopeless should not prevent us from doing our
best.

Teach the student to see the land, understand what he sees, and enjoy what he understands.

The whole conflict thus boils down to a question of degree. We of the minority see a law of diminishing returns in progress; our opponents do not.

There can be no doubt that a society rooted in the soil is more stable than
one rooted in pavements.

Ethical behavior is doing the right thing when no one else is watching- even when doing the wrong thing is legal.

We stand guard over works of art, but species representing the work of aeons are stolen from under our noses

It must be poor life that achieves freedom from fear.

We can be ethical only in relation to something we can see, feel, understand, love, or otherwise have faith in.

Wilderness is a resource which can shrink but not grow ... creation of new wilderness in the full sense of the word is impossible.

An oak is no respecter of persons.

It is, by common consent, a good thing for people to get back to nature.

Obligations have no meaning without conscience, and the problem we face is the extension of the social conscience from people to the land

That dark laboratory we call the soil.

In wildness is the salvation of the world,

Agricultural science is largely a race between the emergence of new pests and the emergence of new techniques for their control.

They know no urge of seasons; they feel no kiss of sun, no lash of wind and weather. They live forever by not living at all.

Camp-keeping in the Delta was not all beer and skittles.

To any one for whom wild things are something more than a pleasant diversion, (conservation) constitutes one of the milestones in moral evolution.

If the land mechanism as a whole is good then every part is good, whether we understand it or not ...

Conservation viewed in its entirety, is the slow and laborious unfolding of a new relationship between people and land.

The landscape of any farm is the owner's portrait of himself.

Patriotism requires less and less of making the eagle scream, but more and more of making him think.

Only the mountain has lived long enough to listen objectively to the howl of the wolf.

Once you learn to read the land, I have no fear of what you will do to it, or with it. And I know many pleasant things it will do to you.

For one species to mourn the death of another is a new thing under the sun.

I do not imply that this philosophy of land was always clear to me. It is rather the end result of a life journey.