Quotes About Harmony

To keep every cog and every wheel is the first precaution of intelligent tinkering.

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

Harmony with land is like harmony with a friend you cannot cherish his right hand and chop off his left.

A thing is right if it tends to preserve the stability, integrity, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong if it tends otherwise.

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.

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.

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

To keep every cog and wheel is the first precaution of intelligent tinkering.

The problem, then, is how to bring about a striving for harmony with land among a people many of whom have forgotten there is any such thing as land, among whom education and culture have become almost synonymous with landlessness. This is the problem of conservation education.

We shall never achieve harmony with land, any more than we shall achieve absolute justice or liberty for people. In these higher aspirations the important thing is not to achieve, but to strive.

A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, the stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.

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

There are some who can live without wild things, and some who cannot. These essays are the delights and dilemmas of those who cannot

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.

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

Once you learn to read the land, I have no fear of what you will do to it, or with it. And I know many pleasant things it will do to you.

Conservation is a state of harmony between men and land.

The mouse is a sober citizen who knows that the grass grows in order that mice may store it as underground haystacks, and that snow falls in order that mice may build subways from stack to stack…

I have read many definitions of what is a conservationist, and written not a few myself, but I suspect that the best one is written not with a pen, but with an axe. It is a matter of what a man thinks about while chopping, or while deciding what to chop. A conservationist is one who is humbly aware that with each stroke he is writing his signature on the face of his land.

And in this annual barter of food for light, and winter warmth for summer solitude, the whole continent receives as net profit a wild poem dropped from the murky skies upon the muds of March.

A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends to do otherwise.

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.

there are two kinds of people: those who can live without wild things & those who cannot.

Then on a still night, when the campfire is low and the Pleiades have climbed over the rimrocks, sit quietly and listen for a wolf to howl, 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.