Quote

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.

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
Drama
Sigh
Dance
Sought
Theater
Farms
Land
Hundreds
Nightly
Live
Owners
Enacted
Entertainment
Theaters
Sky
Harbor
Illusion
Harbors

More quotes by Aldo Leopold

Image
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.
Aldo Leopold
Image
Once you learn to read the land, I have no fear of what you will do to it, or with it. And I know many pleasant things it will do to you.
Aldo Leopold
Image
Never did we plan the morrow, for we had learned that in the wilderness some new and irresistible distraction is sure to turn up each day before breakfast. Like the river, we were free to wander.
Aldo Leopold
Image
The good life of any river may depend on the perception of its music and the preservation of some music to perceive.
Aldo Leopold
Image
There are degrees and kinds of solitude. I know of no solitude so secure as one guarded by a spring flood nor do the geese, who have seen more kinds and degrees of aloneness than I have.
Aldo Leopold
Image
I love all trees, but I am in love with pines.
Aldo Leopold
Image
We all strive for safety, prosperity, comfort, long life, and dullness.
Aldo Leopold
Image
Keeping records enhances the pleasure of the search and the chance of finding order and meaning in these events.
Aldo Leopold
Image
We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect.
Aldo Leopold
Image
Wilderness is a resource which can shrink but not grow.
Aldo Leopold
Image
The sweetest hunts are stolen. To steal a hunt, either go far into the wilderness where no one has been, or else find some undiscovered place under everybody's nose
Aldo Leopold
Image
An Ecologist lives in a world of wounds.
Aldo Leopold
Image
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. By virtue of this curious loophole in the rules, any clodhopper may say: Let there be a tree - and there will be one.
Aldo Leopold
Image
A peculiar virtue in wildlife ethics is that the hunter ordinarily has no gallery to applaud or disapprove of his conduct
Aldo Leopold
Image
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.
Aldo Leopold
Image
The modern dogma is comfort at any cost.
Aldo Leopold
Image
The land-relation is still strictly economic, entailing privileges but not obligations
Aldo Leopold
Image
We stand guard over works of art, but species representing the work of aeons are stolen from under our noses
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
Civilization has so cluttered this elemental man-earth relationship with gadgets and middlemen that awareness of it is growing dim. We fancy that industry supports us, forgetting what supports industry.
Aldo Leopold