Top 200 Aldo Leopold Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “I sit in happy mediation on my rock, pondering, while my line dries again, upon the ways of trout and men. 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. Even so, I think there is some virtue to eagerness, whether its object prove true or false. How utterly dull would be a wholly prudent man, or trout, or world!”

— Aldo Leopold

102. “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

103. “The good life of any river may depend on the perception of its music; and the preservation of some music to perceive.”

— Aldo Leopold

104. “Man brings all things to the test of himself, and this is notably true of lightning.”

— Aldo Leopold

105. “The land-relation is still strictly economic, entailing privileges but not obligations.”

— Aldo Leopold

106. “Our tools are better than we are, and grow better faster than we do. They suffice to crack the atom, to command the tides, but they do not suffice for the oldest task in human history, to live on a piece of land without spoiling it.”

— Aldo Leopold

107. “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.”

— Aldo Leopold

108. “No important change in ethics was ever accomplished without an internal chage in our intellectual emphasis, loyalties, affections, and convictions.”

— Aldo Leopold

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

— Aldo Leopold

110. “Like winds and sunsets, wild things were taken for granted until progress began to do away with them.”

— Aldo Leopold

111. “Our ability to perceive quality in nature begins, as in art, with the pretty. It expands through successive stages of the beautiful to values as yet uncaptured by language.”

— Aldo Leopold

112. “If the land mechanism as a whole is good, then every part is good, whether we understand it or not. If the biota, in the course of aeons, has built something we like but do not understand, then who but a fool would discard seemingly useless parts? To keep every cog and wheel is the first precaution of intelligent tinkering.”

— Aldo Leopold

113. “Bread and beauty grow best together. Their harmonious integration can make farming not only a business but an art; the land not only a food-factory but an instrument for self-expression, on which each can play music to his own choosing.”

— Aldo Leopold

114. “He who searches for spring with his knees in the mud finds it, in abundance.”

— Aldo Leopold

115. “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.”

— Aldo Leopold

116. “Relegating grizzlies to Alaska is about like relegating happiness heaven; one may never get there.”

— Aldo Leopold

117. “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

118. “What conservation education must build is an ethical underpinning for land economics and a universal curiosity to understand the land mechanism. Conservation may then follow.”

— Aldo Leopold

119. “Hemispheric solidarity is new among statesmen, but not among the feathered navies of the sky.”

— Aldo Leopold

120. “A man may not care for golf and still be human, but the man who does not like to see, hunt, photograph, or otherwise outwit birds or animals is hardly normal. He is supercivilized, and I for one do not know how to deal with him.”

— Aldo Leopold

121. “He who hopes for spring with upturned eye never sees so small a thing as Draba. He who despairs of spring with downcast eye steps on it, unknowing. He who searches for spring with his knees in the mud finds it, in abundance.”

— Aldo Leopold

122. “The richest values of wilderness lie not in the days of Daniel Boone, nor even in the present, but rather in the future.”

— Aldo Leopold

123. “A system of conservation based solely on economic self-interest is hopelessly lopsided. It tend to ignore, and thus eventually to eliminate many elements in the land community that lack commercial value, but that are essential to its healthy functioning. It assumes, falsely, I think, that the economic parts of the biotic clock will function without the uneconomic parts.”

— Aldo Leopold

124. “Only economists mistake physical opulence for riches.”

— Aldo Leopold

125. “We grieve only for what we know.”

— Aldo Leopold

126. “Every farm woodland, in addition to yielding lumber, fuel and posts, should provide its owner a liberal education. This crop of wisdom never fails, but it is not always harvested.”

— Aldo Leopold

127. “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

128. “All conservation of wildness is self-defeating, for to cherish we must see and fondle, and when enough have seen and fondled, there is no wilderness left to cherish.”

— Aldo Leopold

129. “The life of every river sings its own song, but in most the song is long marred by the discords of misuse.”

— Aldo Leopold

130. “Health is the capacity of the land for self-renewal.”

— Aldo Leopold

131. “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.”

— Aldo Leopold

132. “On motionless wing they emerge from the lifting mists, sweep a final arc of sky, and settle in clangorous descending spirals to their feeding grounds. A new day has begun on the crane marsh.”

— Aldo Leopold

133. “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.”

— Aldo Leopold

134. “In June as many as a dozen species may burst their buds on a single day. No man can heed all of these anniversaries; no man can ignore all of them.”

— Aldo Leopold

135. “Having to squeeze the last drop of utility out of the land has the same desperate finality as having to chop up the furniture to keep warm.”

— Aldo Leopold

136. “Wilderness is a resource which can shrink but not grow.”

— Aldo Leopold

137. “It is part of wisdom never to revisit a wilderness, for the more golden the lily, the more certain that someone has gilded it.”

— Aldo Leopold

138. “Wildflower corners are easy to maintain, but once gone, they are hard to rebuild.”

— Aldo Leopold

139. “Hydrologists have demonstrated that the meanderings of a creek are a necessary part of the hydrologic functioning. The flood plain belongs to the river. The ecologist sees clearly that for similar reasons we can get along with less channel improvement on Round River.”

— Aldo Leopold

140. “November is, for many reasons, the month for the axe.”

— Aldo Leopold

141. “Is education possibly a process of trading awareness for things of lesser worth?”

— Aldo Leopold

142. “In our attempt to make conservation easy, we have made it trivial.”

— Aldo Leopold

143. “I sit in happy meditation on my rock, pondering, while my line dries again, upon the ways of trout and men. 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

144. “Your woodlot is, in fact, an historical document which faithfully records your personal philosophy.”

— Aldo Leopold

145. “Wilderness areas are first of all a series of sanctuaries for the primitive arts of wilderness travel, especially canoeing and packing.”

— Aldo Leopold

146. “Patriotism requires less and less of making the eagle scream, but more and more of making him think.”

— Aldo Leopold

147. “Time was when education moved toward soil, not away from it.”

— Aldo Leopold

148. “The enthusiasm of geese for high water is a subtle thing, and might be overlooked by those unfamiliar with goose gossip...”

— Aldo Leopold

149. “They know no urge of seasons; they feel no kiss of sun, no lash of wind and weather. They live forever by not living at all.”

— Aldo Leopold

150. “The river was nowhere and everywhere, for he could not decide which of a hundred green lagoons offered the most pleasant and least speedy path to the Gulf. So he traveled them all, and so did we. He divided and rejoined, he twisted and turned, he meandered in awesome jungles, he all but ran in circles, he dallied with lovely groves, he got lost and was glad of it, and so were we. For the last word in procrastination, go travel with a river reluctant to lose his freedom in the sea.”

— Aldo Leopold