Leopold Quotes & Sayings

Never feel safe with the woman you love, for a woman's nature conceals more dangers than you think. — Leopold Von Sacher-Masoch

The whole conflict thus boils down to a question of degree. We of the minority see a law of diminishing returns in progress; our opponents do not. — Aldo Leopold

The foot that is familiar with the grass belongs usually to a man of lighter heart than he whose soles seldom wander from the pavement; and the best elixir vitae is a run, as often as we can contrive it, amid the sweets of new and lovely scenery, where nature sits, fresh from the hand of the Creator, almost chiding us for our delay. — Leopold Hartley Grindon

That land is a community is the basic concept of ecology, but that land is to be loved and respected is an extension of ethics. — Aldo Leopold

It must be poor life that achieves freedom from fear. — Aldo Leopold

I confess my own leisure to be spent entirely in search of adventure, without regard to prudence, profit, self improvement, learning, or any other serious thing. — Aldo Leopold

There are some who can live without wild things and some who cannot. — Aldo Leopold

Die ganzen Zahlen hat der liebe Gatt gemacht, alles andere ist Menschenwerk.
The dear God has made the whole numbers, all the rest is man's work. — Leopold Kronecker

Mechanized recreation already has seized nine-tenths of the woods and mountains; a decent respect for minorities should dedicate the other tenth to wilderness. — Aldo Leopold

It seemed impossible to leave the world until I had produced all that I felt called upon to produce, and so I endured this wretched existence an excitable body which a sudden change can throw from the best into the worst state. Patience I must now choose for my guide, and I have done so. Divine One, thou lookest into my inmost soul, thou knowest it, thou knowest that love of man and desire to do good live therein. — Leopold Stokowski

A small-state world would not only solve the problems of social brutality and war; it would solve the problems of oppression and tyranny. It would solve all problems arising from power. — Leopold Kohr

Harmony with land is like harmony with a friend; you cannot cherish his right hand and chop off his left. That is to say, you cannot love game and hate predators ... The land is one organism. — Aldo Leopold

My wife is really sentimental. One Valentine's Day I gave her a ring and to this day she has never forgotten those three little words that were engraved inside Made in Taiwan! — Leopold Fechtner

If we lose our wilderness , we have nothing left, in my opinion, worth fighting for; or to be more exact, a completely industrialized United States is of no consequence to me. — Aldo Leopold

I do not imply that this philosophy of land was always clear to me. It is rather the end result of a life journey. — Aldo Leopold

This song of the waters is audible to every ear, but there is other music in these hills, by no means audible to all ... On a still night, when the campfire is low and the Pleiades have climbed over rimrocks, sit quietly and listen ... and think hard of everything you have seen and tried to understand. Then you may hear it - a vast pulsing harmony - its score inscribed on a thousand hills, its notes the lives and deaths of plants and animals, its rhythms spanning the seconds and the centuries. — Aldo Leopold

I shall now confess to you that none of those three trout had to be beheaded, or folded double, to fit their casket. What was big was not the trout, but the chance. What was full was not my creel, but my memory. — Aldo Leopold

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

How would you like to have a thousand brilliantly colored cliff swallows keeping house in the eaves of your barn, and gobbling up insects over your farm at the rate of 100,000 per day? There are many Wisconsin farmsteads where such a swallow-show is a distinct possibility. — Aldo Leopold

Perhaps the most serious obstacle impeding the evolution of a land ethic is the fact that our educational and economic system is headed away from, rather than toward, an intense consciousness of land. Your true modern is separated from the land by many middlemen, and by innumerable physical gadgets. He has no vital relation to it; to him it is the space between cities on which crops grow. Turn him loose for a day on the land, and if the spot does not happen to be a golf links or a "scenic" area, he is bored stiff. If crops could be raised by hydroponics instead of farming, it would suit him very well. Synthetic substitutes for wood, leather, wool, and other natural land products suit him better than the originals. In short, land is something he has "outgrown — Aldo Leopold

Wall Street is a place where the day begins with good buys. — Leopold Fechtner

Definitions must contain the means of reaching a decision in a finite number off steps, and existence proofs must be conducted so that the quantity in question can be calculated with any degree of accuracy. — Leopold Kronecker

The real jewel of my disease-ridden woodlot is the prothonotary warbler ... The flash of his gold-and-blue plumage amid the dank decay of the June woods is in itself proof that dead trees are transmuted into living animals, and vice versa. — Aldo Leopold

The land-relation is still strictly economic, entailing privileges but not obligations — Aldo Leopold

Leopold, one of the reporters who broke the Enron story, is now breaking his own story: how he got addicted to cocaine, committed grand theft, cleaned himself up and found happiness as a 'news junkie.' This scrappy memoir ... might become required reading for aspiring journalists. — Publishers Weekly

Why become well-versed in science and the arts if not to impress a lovely little woman? — Leopold Von Sacher-Masoch

So," Wanda cried, "a woman in furs is nothing more than a large cat, a charged electric battery? — Leopold Von Sacher-Masoch

I love her passionately with a morbid intensity; madly as one can only love a woman who never responds to our love with anything but an eternally uniform, eternally calm, stony smile. — Leopold Von Sacher-Masoch

Love knows no virtue, no merit; it loves and forgives and tolerates everything because it must. We are not guided by reason ... — Leopold Von Sacher-Masoch

My heart is a void, dead, and this makes me sad. — Leopold Von Sacher-Masoch

It must be good to die in Toronto. The transition between life and death would be continuous, painless and scarcely noticeable in this silent town. I dreaded the Sundays and prayed to God that if he chose for me to die in Toronto, he would let it be on a Saturday afternoon to save me from one more Toronto Sunday. — Leopold Infeld

Keep your head down, think small, look after yourself: these constituted the lessons of Leopold. The spirit, once comprehensively crushed, does not recover easily. For seventy-five years, from 1885 to 1960, Congo's population had marinated in humiliation. No malevolent witch-doctor could have devised a better preparation for the coming of a second Great Dictator. — Michela Wrong

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. — Aldo Leopold

A slap in the face is more effective than ten lectures. It makes you understand very quickly. — Leopold Von Sacher-Masoch

Whenever something is wrong, something is too big. — Leopold Kohr

A worker without genius is better than a genius who won't work. — Leopold Auer

Watch out, I have a large, very large fur, with which I could cover you up entirely, and I have a mind to catch you in it as in a net. — Leopold Von Sacher-Masoch

Wilderness is a continuous stretch of country preserved in its natural state, open to lawful hunting and fishing, big enough to absorb a two weeks' pack trip, and kept devoid of roads, artificial trails, cottages, or other works of man. — Aldo Leopold

The Good Lord made all the integers; the rest is man's doing. — Leopold Kronecker

The boundary between tame and wild exists only in the imperfections of the human mind. — Aldo Leopold

We face the question whether a still higher "standard of living" is worth its cost in things natural, wild, and free. — Aldo Leopold

The presence of cats exercises such a magic influence upon highly organized men of intellect. This is why these long-tailed Graces of the animal kingdom ... have been the favorite animal of a Mahommed, Cardinal Richelieu, Crebillon, Rousseau, Wieland. — Leopold Von Sacher-Masoch

Let us listen to the voices of our Forebears ... In the smoky cabin, souls that wish us well are murmuring. — Leopold Sedar Senghor

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

And yet the world we live in - its divisions and conflicts, its widening gap between rich and poor, its seemingly inexplicable outbursts of violence - is shaped far less by what we celebrate and mythologize than by the painful events we try to forget. Leopold's Congo is but one of those silences of history. — Adam Hochschild

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

I simply make music, and people have always been foolish enough to pay me for it. I never told them that I would have done it all for nothing. — Leopold Stokowski

The real comic muse is the one underwhose laughing mask tears roll down. — Leopold Von Sacher-Masoch

On December 18, 1940, Hitler signed Directive Number 21, better known as Operation Barbarossa. — Leopold Trepper

Neither blindness nor ignorance corrupts people and governments. They soon realize where the path they have taken is leading them. But there is an impulse within them, favored by their natures and reinforced by their habits, which they do not resist; it continues to propel them forward as long as they have a remnant of strength. He who overcomes himself is divine. Most see their ruin before their eyes; but they go on into it.1 Leopold von Ranke — Joachim Fest

The true comic muse is the one with tears running down under her laughing mask. — Leopold Von Sacher-Masoch

He [Stanley] had stated that he longed to do something wonderful for the African tribes along the Congo, and instead, as would become all too apparent, had set them up for a terrible fate. In 1877 he came down the great river as the first European ever to do so, declaring his hope that the Congo should become like 'a torch to those who sought to do good'." Instead, it became the torch that attracted the archexploiter King Leopold II of Belgium. — Tim Jeal

Most humans recognize their ruin, but they carry on regardless. — Leopold Von Ranke

I told my broker that as long as he doesn't tell me where my money should go, I won't tell him where he should go. — Leopold Fechtner

The artistic image is not intended to represent the thing itself, but, rather, the reality of the force the thing contains. — James Baldwin

It is inconceivable to me that an ethical relation to land can exist without love, respect, and admiration for land, and a high regard for its value. By value, I of course mean something far broader than mere economic value; I mean value in the philosophical sense. — Aldo Leopold

What good your beautiful proof on the transcendence of Pi: Why investigate such problems, given that irrational numbers do not even exist? — Leopold Kronecker

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

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 adults as the thing children lack, is not actually a progressive dilution of the essentials by the trivialities of living. — Aldo Leopold

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

Is education possibly a process of trading awareness for things of lesser worth? — Aldo Leopold

Examine each question in terms of what is ethically and aesthetically right, as well as what is economically expedient. A thing is right when it tends to perserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise. — Aldo Leopold

The highest reaches of music come thrillingly close to the central core and essence of life itself. — Leopold Stokowski

They had the magic pill, the solution to the inertia and frustration that has plagued the great literary protagonists I'd related to all my life - be it Leopold Bloom, Alex Portnoy, or Piglet from Winnie the Pooh. As — Neil Strauss

You modern men, you children of reason, cannot begin to appreciate love as pure bliss and divine serenity. — Leopold Von Sacher-Masoch

Music comes from the heart and returns to the heart ... music is spontaneous, impulsive expression ... its range is without limit ... forever growing ... can be one element to help us build a new conception of life in which the madness and cruelty of wars will be replaced by a simple understanding of the brotherhood of man. — Leopold Stokowski

Wilderness is the raw material out of which man has hammered the artifact called civilization. — Aldo Leopold

The right kind of practice is not a matter of hours. Practice should represent the utmost concentration of brain. It is better to play with concentration for two hours than to practice eight without. I should say that four hours would be a good maximum practice time-I never ask more of my pupils-and that during each minute of the time the brain be as active as the fingers. — Leopold Auer

Jason Leopold's News Junkie, an autobiographical look at Leopold's accidental entrance into journalism, is a powerful piece that delves into one man's misery and success. — Boston Herald

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

We grieve only for what we know. — Aldo Leopold

I imagine that the goddess of Love has come down from Olympus to visit a mortal. So as not to die of cold in this modern world of ours, she wraps her sublime body in great heavy furs and warms her feet on the prostrate body of her lover. I imagine the favorite of this beautiful despot, who is whipped when his mistress grows tired of kissing him, and whose love only grows more intense the more he is trampled underfoot. I shall call the picture Venus in Furs — Leopold Von Sacher-Masoch

Now I'm in real trouble. First my laundry called and said they lost my shirt and then my broker said the same thing. — Leopold Fechtner

But why talk in superlatives, as if something that is beautiful could be surpassed? — Leopold Von Sacher-Masoch

At first blush I am tempted to conclude that a satisfactory hobby must be in large degree useless, inefficient, laborious, or irrelevant. — Aldo Leopold

My obligation is to focus on the priorities of classroom instruction, parental involvement and student safety, targeting student performance and eliminating unnecessary administrative costs. — John R. Leopold

People who want to live like Olympian gods must have slaves whom they throw into their fishponds and gladiators who fight during their masters sumptuous banquets-and the pleasure-seekers never care if some blood splatters on them. — Leopold Von Sacher-Masoch

When some remote ancestor of ours invented the shovel, he became a giver: He could plant a tree. And when the axe was invented, he became a taker: He could chop it down. Whoever owns land has thus assumed, whether he knows it or not, the divine functions of creating and destroying plants. — Aldo Leopold

Teach the student to see the land, understand what he sees, and enjoy what he understands. — 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

The wind that makes music in November corn is in a hurry. The stalks hum, the loose husks whisk skyward in half-playing swirls, and the wind hurries on ... A tree tries to argue, bare limbs waving, but there is no detaining the wind. — Aldo Leopold

Conservation viewed in its entirety, is the slow and laborious unfolding of a new relationship between people and land. — Aldo Leopold

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

I have always taken care to put an idea or emotion behind my words. I have made it a habit to be suspicious of the mere music of words. — Leopold Sedar Senghor

Camp-keeping in the Delta was not all beer and skittles. — Aldo Leopold

Our children are our signature to the roster of history; our land is merely the place our money was made. There is as yet no social stigma in the possession of a gullied farm, a wrecked forest, or a polluted stream, provided the dividends suffice to send the youngsters to college. Whatever ails the land, the government will fix it. — Aldo Leopold

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, A Sand County Almanac — Aldo Leopold

When I speak of knowledge of nature, I do not mean industrial science, which argues that nature is inert and can be understood only to enable humans to manipulate it. I mean that sense of nature that Aldo Leopold had in mind when he said, A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community, wrong when it tends otherwise. — Kirkpatrick Sale

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

I believe in a passionately strong feeling for the poetry of life - for the beautiful, the mysterious, the romantic, the ecstatic - the loveliness of Nature, the lovability of people, everything that excites us, everything that starts our imagination working, LAUGHTER, gaiety, strength, heroism, love, tenderness, every time we see - however dimly - the godlike that is in everyone and want to kneel in reverence. — Leopold Stokowski

The modern dogma is comfort at any cost. — Aldo Leopold

To any one for whom wild things are something more than a pleasant diversion, (conservation) constitutes one of the milestones in moral evolution. — Aldo Leopold

The health of our waters is the principle measure of how we live on the land. — Luna Leopold

I know a painting so evanescent that it is seldom viewed at all except by some wandering deer. It is a river who wields the brush and it is the same river who before I can bring my friends to view his work erases it forever from human view. After that it exists only in my mind's eye. — Aldo Leopold

Fantasy works inwards upon its author, blurring the boundary between the visioned and the actual, and associating itself ever moreclosely with the Ego, so that the child who has fantasied himself a murderer ends by becoming a Loeb or a Leopold. The creative Imagination works outwards, steadily increasing the gap between the visioned and the actual, till this becomes the great gulf fixed between art and nature. Few writers of crime-stories become murderers
if any do, it is not the result of identifying themselves with their murderous heroes. — Dorothy L. Sayers

A minimal level of sportsman ethics afield is mandated by written law. Beyond that, say, when an action is legal but ethically questionable, or when (as Aldo Leopold long ago pointed out) no one is watching, hunter ethics is an individual responsibility. As the existentialists would have it, we determine our own honor minute by minute, action by action, one decision at a time. — David Petersen

I am asserting that those who love the wilderness should not be wholly deprived of it, that while the reduction of the wilderness has been a good thing, its extermination would be a very bad one, and that the conservation of wilderness is the most urgent and difficult of all the tasks that confront us, because there are no economic laws to help and many to hinder its accomplishment. — Aldo Leopold

Obligations have no meaning without conscience, and the problem we face is the extension of the social conscience from people to the land — Aldo Leopold

Nature admits of no permanence in the relation between man and woman. It is only man's egoism that wants to keep woman like some buried treasure. All endeavors to introduce permanence in love, the most changeable thing in this changeable human existence, have gone shipwreck in spite of religious ceremonies, vows, and legalities. — Leopold Von Sacher-Masoch

The Mexican gray wolves are actually responsible for the spark of legendary environmentalists Aldo Leopold and Ernest Seton. In both cases, the men found their lives and souls forever changed after they killed Mexican gray wolves. — Joy Covey