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

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

More quotes by Aldo Leopold

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I confess my own leisure to be spent entirely in search of adventure, without regard to prudence, profit, self improvement, learning, or any other serious thing.
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That dark laboratory we call the soil.
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To look into the eyes of a wolf is to see your own soul - hope you like what you see.
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The land-relation is still strictly economic, entailing privileges but not obligations
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A conservationist is one who is humbly aware that with each stroke [of the axe] he is writing his signature on the face of his land.
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Acts of creation are ordinarily reserved for gods and poets, but humbler folk may circumvent this restriction if they know how. To plant a pine, for example, one need be neither god nor poet one need only own a shovel.
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Like all real treasures of the mind, perception can be split into infinitely small fractions without losing its quality. The weeds in a city lot convey the same lesson as the redwoods the farmer may see in his cow-pasture what may not be vouchsafed to the scientist adventuring in the South Seas.
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Land health is the capacity for self-renewal in the soils, waters, plants, and animals that collectively comprise the land.
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I love all trees, but I am in love with pines.
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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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The last word in ignorance is the man who says of an animal or plant: 'What good is it?
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Wilderness is the raw material out of which man has hammered the artifact called civilization.
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To keep every cog and wheel is the first precaution of intelligent tinkering.
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There are some who can live without wild things and some who cannot.
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Mechanized recreation already has seized nine-tenths of the woods and mountains a decent respect for minorities should dedicate the other tenth to wilderness.
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The first law of intelligent tinkering is to save all the parts
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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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For unnumbered centuries of human history the wilderness has given way. The priority of industry has become dogma. Are we as yet sufficiently enlightened to realize that we must now challenge that dogma, or do without our wilderness? Do we realize that industry, which has been our good servant, might make a poor master?
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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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