Quote

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

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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
Circumstances
Shakes
Gilded
Wind
Fishing
Seize
Ready
River
Eager
Whatever
Fish
Haste
Upon
Fishes
Circumstance
Thing
Findings
Contain
Time
Finding
Hook
Rue
Like
Rivers
Hunting
Morsel

More quotes by Aldo Leopold

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Wilderness is the raw material out of which man has hammered the artifact called civilization. Wilderness was never a homogenous raw material. It was very diverse. The differences in the product are known as cultures. The rich diversity of the worlds cultures reflects a corresponding diversity. In the wilds that gave them birth.
Aldo Leopold
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It must be poor life that achieves freedom from fear.
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It is in midwinter that I sometimes glean from my pines... a curious transfusion of courage.
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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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If we lose our wilderness, we have nothing left worth fighting for.
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Wildflower corners are easy to maintain, but once gone, they are hard to rebuild.
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I do not imply that this philosophy of land was always clear to me. It is rather the end result of a life journey.
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At first blush I am tempted to conclude that a satisfactory hobby must be in large degree useless, inefficient, laborious, or irrelevant.
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To those who know the speech of hills and rivers straightening a stream is like shipping vagrants—a very successful method of passing trouble from one place to the next. It solves nothing in any collective sense.
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The worthiness of any cause is not measured by its clean record, but by its readiness to see the blots when they are pointed out, and to change its mind.
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No matter how intently one studies the hundred little dramas of the woods and meadows, one can never learn all the salient facts about any one of them.
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Is education possibly a process of trading awareness for things of lesser worth? The goose who trades his is soon a pile of feathers.
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The life of every river sings its own song, but in most the song is long marred by the discords of misuse.
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Ethical behavior is doing the right thing when no one else is watching- even when doing the wrong thing is legal.
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Wildlife administration, in this respect, is not yet a profession.
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Thus far we have considered the problem of conservation of land purely as an economic issue. A false front of exclusively economic determinism is so habitual to Americans in discussing public questions that one must speak in the language of compound interest to get a hearing.
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A peculiar virtue in wildlife ethics is that the hunter ordinarily has no gallery to applaud or disapprove of his conduct
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O, God assist our side: at least, avoid assisting the enemy and leave the rest to me
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In that year [1865] John Muir offered to buy from his brother ... a sanctuary for the wildflowers that had gladdened his youth. His brother declined to part with the land, but he could not suppress the idea: 1865 still stands in Wisconsin history as the birth-year of mercy for things natural, wild, and free.
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Wilderness, then, assumes unexpected importance as a laboratory for the study of land - health.
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