297 Quotes by Aldo Leopold

All history consists of successive excursions from a single starting-point, to which man returns again and again to organize yet another search for a durable scale of values.

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.

Barring love and war, few enterprises are undertaken with such abandon, or by such diverse individuals, or with so paradoxical a mixture of appetite and altruism, as that group of avocations known as outdoor recreation. It is, by common consent, a good thing for people to get back to nature. But wherein lies the goodness, and what can be done to encourage its pursuit?

Do we realize that industry, which has been our good servant, might make a poor master?

No farmer-sportsman group is stronger than the ties of mutual confidence and enthusiasm which bind its members.

Recreational development is a job not of building roads into lovely country, but of building receptivity into the still unlovely human mind.

Six days shalt thou paddle and pack, but on the seventh thou shall wash thy socks.

My dog does not care where heat comes from, but he cares that it comes, and soon. Indeed he considers my ability to make it come as something magical, for when I rise in the coal black pre-dawn and kneel by the hearth to make a fire, he pushes himself blandly between me and the kindling splits I have laid in the ashes, and I must touch a match to them by poking it between his legs. Such faith , I suppose, is the kind that moves mountains.

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.