“ When I call to mind my earliest impressions, I wonder whether the process ordinarily referred to as growing up is not actually a process of growing down; whether experience, so much touted among adult… Aldo Leopold
“ 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
“ Acts of creation are ordinarily reserved for gods and poets, but humbler folk may circumvent this restriction if they know how. Aldo Leopold
“ I am convinced that most Americans of the new generation have no idea what a decent forest looks like. The only way to tell them is to show them. Aldo Leopold
“ This whole effort to rebuild and stabilize a countryside is not without its disappointments and mistakes... What matter though these temporary growing pains when one can cast his eye upon the hills an… Aldo Leopold
“ To those devoid of imagination a blank place on the map is a useless waste; to others, the most valuable part. Aldo Leopold
“ 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
“ 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… Aldo Leopold
“ There are two spiritual dangers in not owning a farm. One is the danger of supposing that breakfast comes from the grocery, and the other that heat comes from the furnace. Aldo Leopold
“ 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
“ We shall never achieve harmony with the land, anymore than we shall achieve absolute justice or liberty for people. In these higher aspirations the important thing is not to achieve but to strive. Aldo Leopold
“ One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds. Much of the damage inflicted on land is quite invisible to laymen. An ecologist must either harden his she… Aldo Leopold
