Michael > Michael's Quotes

“Have no fear of perfection - you'll never reach it.”
― Salvador Dali

“I don't do drugs. I am drugs.”
― Salvador Dali

“An elegant woman is a woman who despises you and has no hair under her arms.”
― Salvador Dali, The Secret Life Of Salvador Dali

“At the age of six I wanted to be a cook. At seven I wanted to be Napoleon. And my ambition has been growing steadily ever since.”
― Salvador Dali

“There are some days when I think I'm going to die from an overdose of satisfaction.”
― Salvador Dalí

“One day it will have to be officially admitted that what we have christened reality is an even greater illusion than the world of dreams.”
― Salvador Dali

“Let the labyrinth of wrinkles be furrowed in my brow with the red-hot iron of my own life, let my hair whiten and my step become vacillating, on condition that I can save the intelligence of my soul - let my unformed childhood soul, as it ages, assume the rational and esthetic forms of an architecture, let me learn just everything that others cannot teach me, what only life would be capable of marking deeply in my skin!”
― Salvador Dalí

“It's better to have loved and lost than do forty pounds of laundry a week.”
― Salvador Dalí

“I dedicate this novel to Gala, who was constantly by my side while I was writing it, who was the good fairy of my equilibrium, who banished the salamanders of my doubts and strengthened the lions of certainties...”
― Salvador Dalí, Hidden Faces

“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, A Sand County Almanac

“I am glad I will not be young in a future without wilderness.”
― Aldo Leopold

“Conservation is getting nowhere because it is incompatible with our Abrahamic concept of land. 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

“There are some who can live without wild things and some who cannot.”
― Aldo Leopold

“Ethical behavior is doing the right thing when no one else is watching- even when doing the wrong thing is legal.”
― Aldo Leopold

“We abuse land because we see 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

“The last word in ignorance is the man who says of an animal or plant, "What good is it?" 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, Round River: From the Journals of 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, A Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here and There

“We reached the old wolf in time to watch a fierce green fire dying in her eyes. I realized then, and have known ever since, that there was something new to me in those eyes – something known only to her and to the mountain. I was young then, and full of trigger-itch; I thought that because fewer wolves meant more deer, that no wolves would mean hunters’ paradise. But after seeing the green fire die, I sensed that neither the wolf nor the mountain agreed with such a view.”
― 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, Round River: From the Journals of Aldo Leopold

“Cease being intimidated by the argument that a right action is impossible because it does not yield maximum profits, or that a wrong action is to be condoned because it pays.”
― Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac

“To those devoid of imagination a blank place on the map is a useless waste; to others, the most valuable part.”
― Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here and There

“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, A Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here and There

“Like winds and sunsets, wild things were taken for granted until progress began to do away with them. Now we face the question whether a still higher 'standard of living' is worth its cost in things natural, wild and free. For us of the minority, the opportunity to see geese is more important than television.”
― Aldo Leopold

“Only the mountain has lived long enough to listen objectively to the howl of the wolf.”
― 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

“Is education possibly a process of trading awareness for things of lesser worth?”
― Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here and There

“Nonconformity is the highest evolutionary attainment of social animals.”
― Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here and There

“But wherever the truth may lie, this much is crystal-clear: our bigger-and-better society is now like a hypochondriac, so obsessed with its own economic health as to have lost the capacity to remain healthy. . . . Nothing could be more salutary at this stage than a little healthy contempt for a plethora of material blessings.”
― Aldo Leopold

“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, A Sand County Almanac

“One swallow does not make a summer, but one skein of geese, cleaving the murk of a March thaw, is the spring.”
― Aldo Leopold