“Acts of creation are ordinarily reserved for gods and poets, but humbler folk may circumvent this restriction if they know how. To plant a pine, for example, one need be neither god nor poet; one need only own a shovel. By virtue of this curious loophole in the rules, any clodhopper may say: Let there be a tree—and there will be one.”
“December: Pines above the Snow”, p. 81.
A Sand County Almanac, 1949, "November: Axe-in-Hand," "November: A Mighty Fortress," and "December: Pines above the Snow"
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Aldo Leopold130
American writer and scientist 1887–1948Related quotes
Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862) 1817-1862 American poet, essayist, naturalist, and abolitionist
A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext03/7cncd10.txt (1849), Sunday
Dan Simmons book The Fall of Hyperion
Source: The Fall of Hyperion (1990), Chapter 45 (p. 504)
“One may quote bad poetry if it is by a great poet.”
Pierre Choderlos de Laclos book Les Liaisons dangereuses
On peut citer de mauvais vers, quand ils sont d'un grand poète. <br class="br">Letter 4: Le Vicomte de Valmont to la Marquise de Merteuil. Trans. P.W.K. Stone (1961). http://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Les_Liaisons_dangereuses_-_Lettre_4 <br class="br">Les liaisons dangereuses (1782)
Abd al-Karim Qasim (1914–1963) Prime Minister of Iraq
The historical extempore speech at the Reserve Officers' College (1959)
James A. Garfield (1831–1881) American politician, 20th President of the United States (in office in 1881)
Speech at Arlington Cemetery, Decoration Day (30 May 1868)
1860s
Context: I am oppressed with a sense of the impropriety of uttering words on this occasion. If silence is ever golden, it must be here, beside the graves of fifteen thousand men, whose lives were more significant than speech, and whose death was a poem, the music of which can never be sung. With words we make promises, plight faith, praise virtue. Promises may not be kept, plighted faith may be broken, and vaunted virtue be only the cunning mask of vice. We do not know one promise these men made, one pledge they gave, one word they spoke: but we do know they summed up and perfected, by one supreme act, the highest virtues of men and citizens. For love of country they accepted death, and thus resolved all doubts, and made immortal their patriotism and their virtue.
Joseph Smith, Jr. book History of the Church
History of the Church, 6:476 (7 April 1844)
1840s, King Follett discourse (1844)