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
Sees
Despairs
Despair
Unknowing
Spring
Searches
Steps
Mud
Small
Hopes
Eye
Abundance
Thing
Finds
Upturned
Never
Knees
Downcast

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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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Education, I fear, is learning to see one thing by going blind to another.
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I am glad I will not be young in a future without wilderness.
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When I call to mind my earliest impressions, I wonder whether the process ordinarily referred to as growing up is not actually a process of growing down whether experience, so much touted among adults as the thing children lack, is not actually a progressive dilution of the essentials by the trivialities of living.
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Man brings all things to the test of himself, and this is notably true of lightning.
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We face the question whether a still higher standard of living is worth its cost in things natural, wild, and free.
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Wilderness is a resource which can shrink but not grow.
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Science contributes moral as well as material blessings to the world. Its great moral contribution is objectivity, or the scientific point of view. This means doubting everything except facts it means hewing to the facts, let the chips fall where they may.
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The drama of the sky dance is enacted nightly on hundreds of farms, the owners of which sigh for entertainment, but harbor the illusion that it is to be sought in theaters. They live on the land, but not by the land.
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I love all trees, but I am in love with pines.
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The last word in ignorance is the man who says of an animal or plant: 'What good is it?
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Bread and beauty grow best together. Their harmonious integration can make farming not only a business but an art the land not only a food-factory but an instrument for self-expression, on which each can play music to his own choosing.
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How like fish we are: ready, nay eager, to seize upon whatever new thing some wind of circumstance shakes down upon the river of time! And how we rue our haste, finding the gilded morsel to contain a hook!
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No important change in ethics was ever accomplished without an internal chage in our intellectual emphasis, loyalties, affections, and convictions.
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To those devoid of imagination a blank place on the map is a useless waste to others, the most valuable part.
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What more delightful avocation than to take a piece of land and by cautious experimentation to prove how it works. What more substantial service to conservation than to practice it on one's own land?
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There are some who can live without wild things, and some who cannot. For us of the minority, the opportunity to see geese is more important than television, and the chance to find a pasque-flower is a right as inalienable as free speech.
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Health is the capacity of the land for self-renewal.
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There is value in any experience that exercises those ethical restraints collectively called sportsmanship.
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