Jan Johnsen > Jan's Quotes

“Show me your garden and I shall tell you what you are.”
― Alfred Austin

“We are all butterflies. Earth is our chrysalis.”
― LeeAnn Taylor

“Well, I must endure the presence of a few caterpillars if I wish to become acquainted with the butterflies.”
― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince

“Perfection is everywhere if we only choose to recognise it.”
― Kakuzō Okakura, The Book of Tea

“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

“Ethical behavior is doing the right thing when no one else is watching- even when doing the wrong thing is legal.”
― 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 shell and make believe that the consequences of science are none of his business, or he must be the doctor who sees the marks of death in a community that believes itself well and does not want to be told otherwise.”
― Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac

“I think of the trees and how simply they let go, let fall the riches of a season, how without grief (it seems) they can let go and go deep into their roots for renewal and sleep ... Imitate the trees. Learn to lose in order to recover, and remember that nothing stays the same for long, not even pain, psychic pain. Sit it out. Let it all pass.”
― May Sarton, Journal of a Solitude

“If my decomposing carcass helps nourish the roots of a juniper tree or the wings of a vulture—that is immortality enough for me. And as much as anyone deserves.”
― Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire

“People from a planet without flowers would think we must be mad with joy the whole time to have such things about us.”
― Iris Murdoch