Quote

I shall now confess to you that none of those three trout had to be beheaded, or folded double, to fit their casket. What was big was not the trout, but the chance. What was full was not my creel, but my memory.

Aldo Leopold

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
None
Casket
Memories
Caskets
Shall
Folded
Full
Trout
Chance
Confess
Water
Double
Bigs
Fit
Three
Memory
Beheaded

More quotes by Aldo Leopold

Image
Time was when education moved toward soil, not away from it.
Aldo Leopold
Image
The elemental simplicities of wilderness travel were thrills. They represented complete freedom to make mistakes. The wilderness gave those rewards and penalties, for wise and foolish acts against which civilization has built a thousand buffers.
Aldo Leopold
Image
We face the question whether a still higher standard of living is worth its cost in things natural, wild, and free.
Aldo Leopold
Image
There are two things that interest me: the relation of people to each other, and the relation of people to land.
Aldo Leopold
Image
Individual thinkers since the days of Ezekiel and Isaiah have asserted that the despoliation of land is not only inexpedient but wrong. Society, however, has not yet affirmed their belief.
Aldo Leopold
Image
Whoever invented the word 'grace' must have seen the wing-folding of the plover.
Aldo Leopold
Image
I have purposely presented the land ethic as a product of social evolution because nothing so important as an ethic is ever 'written'… It evolves in the minds of a thinking community.
Aldo Leopold
Image
It must be poor life that achieves freedom from fear.
Aldo Leopold
Image
Wilderness areas are first of all a series of sanctuaries for the primitive arts of wilderness travel, especially canoeing and packing.
Aldo Leopold
Image
Tell me of what plant-birthday a man takes notice, and I shall tell you a good deal about his vocation, his hobbies, his hay fever, and the general level of his ecological education.
Aldo Leopold
Image
But wherever the truth may lie, this much is crystal-clear: our bigger-and-better society is now like a hypochondriac, so obsessed with its own economic health as to have lost the capacity to remain healthy. . . . Nothing could be more salutary at this stage than a little healthy contempt for a plethora of material blessings.
Aldo Leopold
Image
I know a painting so evanescent that it is seldom viewed at all except by some wandering deer. It is a river who wields the brush and it is the same river who before I can bring my friends to view his work erases it forever from human view. After that it exists only in my mind's eye.
Aldo Leopold
Image
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.
Aldo Leopold
Image
At first blush I am tempted to conclude that a satisfactory hobby must be in large degree useless, inefficient, laborious, or irrelevant.
Aldo Leopold
Image
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!
Aldo Leopold
Image
All ethics so far evolved rest upon a single premise: that the individual is a member of a community of interdependent parts.
Aldo Leopold
Image
Six days shalt thou paddle and pack, but on the seventh thou shall wash thy socks.
Aldo Leopold
Image
If in a city we had six vacant lots available to the youngsters of a certain neighborhood for playing ball, it might be development to build houses on the first, and the second, and the third, and the fourth, and even the fifth, but when we build houses on the last one, we forget what houses are for.
Aldo Leopold
Image
There is time not only to see who has done what, but to speculate why.
Aldo Leopold
Image
When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may see it with love and respect. - Perhaps such a shift of values can be achieved by reappraising things unnatural, tame, and confined in terms of things natural, wild, and free.
Aldo Leopold