Quote

He who hopes for spring with upturned eye never sees so small a thing as Draba. He who despairs of spring with downcast eye steps on it, unknowing. He who searches for spring with his knees in the mud finds it, in abundance.

Aldo Leopold

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Aldo Leopold
Age: 60 †
Born: 1887
Born: January 1
Died: 1948
Died: January 1
Academic
Author
Botanical Collector
Ecologist
Environmentalist
Forestry Scientist
Naturalist
Philosopher
University Teacher
Burlington
Iowa
Aldo Starker Leopold
Rand Aldo Leopold
Eye
Abundance
Thing
Finds
Upturned
Never
Knees
Downcast
Sees
Despairs
Despair
Unknowing
Spring
Searches
Steps
Mud
Small
Hopes

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Harmony with land is like harmony with a friend you cannot cherish his right hand and chop off his left.
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What a dull world if we knew all about geese!
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There are two things that interest me: the relation of people to each other, and the relation of people to land.
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We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us.
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Ability to see the cultural value of wilderness boils down, in the last analysis, to a question of intellectual humility. The shallow-minded modern who has lost his rootage in the land assumes that he has already discovered what is important.
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All history consists of successive excursions from a single starting-point, to which man returns again and again to organize yet another search for a durable scale of values.
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Man always kills the thing he loves, and so we the pioneers have killed our wilderness. Some say we had to. Be that as it may, I am glad I shall never be young without wild country to be young in. Of what avail are forty freedoms without a blank spot on the map?
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An oak is no respecter of persons.
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In farm country, the plover has only two real enemies: the gully and the drainage ditch. Perhaps we shall one day find that these are our enemies, too.
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For one species to mourn the death of another is a new thing under the sun.
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I am glad I will not be young in a future without wilderness.
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Sometimes in June, when I see unearned dividends of dew hung on every lupine, I have doubts about the real poverty of the sands. On solvent farmlands lupines do not even grow, much less collect a daily rainbow of jewels.
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To build a road is so much simpler than to think of what the country really needs.
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One swallow does not make a summer, but one skein of geese, cleaving the murk of March thaw, is the Spring.
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The richest values of wilderness lie not in the days of Daniel Boone, nor even in the present, but rather in the future.
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Conservation is a state of harmony between men and land.
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Two things hold promise of improving those lights. One is to apply science to land-use. The other is to cultivate a love of country a little less spangled with stars, and a little more imbued with that respect for mother-earth - the lack of which is, to me, the outstanding attribute of the machine-age.
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Keeping records enhances the pleasure of the search and the chance of finding order and meaning in these events.
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Like winds and sunsets, wild things were taken for granted until progress began to do away with them. Now we face the question whether a still higher 'standard of living' is worth its cost in things natural, wild and free. For us of the minority, the opportunity to see geese is more important than television.
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Our ability to perceive quality in nature begins, as in art, with the pretty.
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