Fishing Quotations | Page 7

There is a lot of amiable fantasy written about trout fishing, but the truth is that few men know much if anything about the habits of trout and little more about the manner of taking them.

The true fisherman approaches the first day of fishing season with all the sense of wonder and awe of a child approaching Christmas.

During my addled career as a trout fisherman I have gone on a lot of wild-goose chases, and I ruefully expect to go on a lot more before I hang up my waders

Fly-fishing for wild trout on quiet waters must be one of the toughest and craziest ways to catch fish ever invented by man, as well as among the most frustrating and humiliating.

I look at trees, hunt mushrooms, and watch animals. Fishing is what gets me out into the woods so I can notice these things.

One of the first rules in fishing is that there are few rules in fishing that resourceful trout do not manage to break.

Fly-fishing is a magic way to recapture the rapture of solitude without the pangs of loneliness.

...buying a fly rod in the average city store, that is, joining it up and safely waggling it a bit, is much like seeing a woman's arm protruding from a car window: all one can readily be sure of is that the window is open.

I fish because I love to . . . because I love the environs where trout are found . . . because I suspect that men are going along this way for the last time, and I for one don’t want to waste the trip . . . and, finally, not because I regard fishing as being so terribly important but because I suspect that so many of the other concerns of men are equally unimportant––and not nearly so much fun.

Most fishermen swiftly learn that it's a pretty good rule never to show a favorite spot to any fisherman you wouldn't trust with your wife.

I go to Alaska and fish salmon. I do some halibut fishing, lake fishing, trout fishing, fly fishing. I look quite good in waders. I love my waders. I don't think there is anything sexier than just standing in waders with a fly rod. I just love it.

Take my friends and my home - as an outcast I'll roam: Take the money I have in the bank: It is just what I wish, but deprive me of fish, And my life would indeed be blank.

Fishing: I don't really like it. I don't really like the expression on the fish's face.

Retire to what? I already play golf and fish for a living.

The fact is, there's a great deal of hair-splitting fussiness when it comes to fly-fishing, most of it as silly as a top hat.

Many years ago, I was fishing, and as I was reeling in the poor fish, I realized, 'I am killing him?all for the passing pleasure it brings me.' And something inside me clicked. I realized as I watched him fight for breath, that his life was as important to him as mine is to me.

All consumption should be local. No food products need to be transported over hundreds of miles to market. All commercial fishing should be abolished. If local communities need to fish the fish should be caught individually by hand. We need to stop flying, stop driving cars, and jetting around on marine recreational vehicles.

What is the politically correct term for 'retarded'?""I think the words you're fishing for are 'mentally disabled.' And no. I'm not mentally disabled.

If you don't want people to look at you, Park had thought at the time, don't wear fishing lures in your hair. Her jewelry box must look like a junk drawer.

I object to fishing tournaments less for what they do to fish than what they do to fishermen.

My fishing hole is deader than...a dead thing that's dead.

I fished upstream coming ever closer and closer to the narrow staircase of the canyon. Then I went up into it as if I were entering a department store. I caught three trout in the lost and found department.

I love fishing. You put that line in the water and you don't know what's on the other end. Your imagination is under there.

Why are you obsessed with fighting? Stick to fishing from now on.

If fishing is a religion, fly fishing is the high church.

The fishing is best where the fewest go. There is just less competition for bigger goals.

The fishing is best where the fewest go and the collective insecurity of the world makes it easy for people to hit home runs while everyone is aiming for base hits.

The only reason I ever played in the first place was so I could afford to hunt and fish.

I never hesitated to promote someone I didn't like. The comfortable assistant - the nice guy you like to go on fishing trips with - is a great pitfall. Instead I looked for those sharp, scratchy, harsh, almost unpleasant guys who see and tell you about things as they really are. If you can get enough of them around you, and have patience enough to hear them out, there is no limit to where you can go.

The trout in yonder wimpling burn - That glides, a silver dart, - And, safe beneath the shady thorn, - Defies the anglers art...

The lightly-jumping, glowrin' trouts, That thro' my waters play...

A Rod: An attractively painted length of fiberglass that keeps an angler from ever getting too close to a fish.

We'd like to make it [bucky fiber] in a continuous fiber, roll it on a drum, and go fishing with it.

There many guys out there who are actually fishing for a woman whom they are planning on keeping. But there are guys out there who are just sports fishing - catching them and then throwing them back into the ocean.

Here began countless days of hunting and snaring, fishing and gathering, roaming together through the woods, unloading our thoughts while we filled our game bags. This was the doorway to both sustenance and sanity. And we were each other's key.

Cut off my head, and singular I am, Cut off my tail, and plural I appear; Although my middle's left, there's nothing there! What is my head cut off? A sounding sea; What is my tail cut off? A rushing river; And in their mingling depths I fearless play, Parent of sweetest sounds, yet mute forever.

Oh yeah - you have to write every day. Or every weekday. Because writing is a job. It's not eureka moments over and over. It's grueling work, panning for gold. You just keep at it and eventually you get a few grains. Or flakes. Or whatever gold looks like in rivers. Or maybe it's like fishing. Who cares? You just have to do it every day because you never know which day is going to be your productive day.

Thomas More: Will, I'd trust you with my life. But not your principles. You see, we speak of being anchored to our principles. But if the weather turns nasty you up with an anchor and let it down where there's less wind, and the fishing's better. And "Look," we say, "look, I'm anchored! To my principles!

You won't find one fish in a million that has enough sense to come in when it rains.

From 1997 to 2003, there was a decline of 50 percent in the proportion of children nine to twelve who spent time in such outside activities as hiking, walking, fishing, beach play, and gardening, according to a study by Sandra Hofferth at the University of Maryland.

Just imagine the banner headlines if a marine biologist were to discover a species of dolphin that wove large, intricately meshed fishing nets, twenty dolphin-lengths in diameter! Yet we take a spider web for granted, as a nuisance in the house rather than as one of the wonders of the world. And think of the furore if Jane Goodall returned from Gombe stream with photographs of wild chimpanzees building their own houses, well roofed and insulated, of painstakingly selected stones neatly bonded and mortared! Yet caddis larvae, who do precisely that, command only passing interest.

It's like a jumble of huts in a jungle somewhere. I don't understand how you can live there. It's really, completely dead. Walk along the street, there's nothing moving. I've lived in small Spanish fishing villages which were literally sunny all day long everyday of the week, but they weren't as boring as Los Angeles.

I’m a country boy, so I really appreciate the country. I love fishing, so I fish between takes on set. During lunch, I go for a fish.

Can there be a more lamentable picture than that of a Chancellor of the Exchequer seated on an empty chest by a pool of bottomless deficiency fishing for a budget?

I will catch Christ with a greased worm, And when the Prince of Darkness stalks My bloodstream to its Stygian term . . . On water the Man-Fisher walks.

Wallowing in this bloody sty, I cast for fish that pleased my eye

Once fishing was a rabbit's foot-- O wind blow cold, O wind blow hot

Their monument sticks like a fishbone in the city's throat.

The orb came about because I wanted to do this kitsch sweater for Prince Charles when he went hunting and fishing with his kilt on.

the profound difference that divides the human race is a question of bait - whether to fish with worms or not ...

fishing teaches a stern morality; inculcates a remorseless honesty.

There's fish in the sea, no doubt of it, As good as ever came out of it.

I got a little bit of a sense for the subculture, which is the equivalent of any subculture, really. The stakes are high, even if you live in a small town. It's like the annual bass fishing contests, or whatever it is. The stakes are always absurdly high, and this is no different. The competition at this butter carving things, from what I understand, is not that far off from what we're depicting in the movie.

Angling is an amusement peculiarly adapted to the mild and cultivated scenery of England

There is certainly something in angling that tends to produce a serenity of the mind.

Some friends and I, we went right up there behind the studio and we got on a train, we could tell it was going to go to Roseville. We got off it and got on another train. And we got to Roseville, and it takes hours to get through that yard. It's really big. So we ended up just coming back here. It's like fishing or hunting. You can't always come back with something.

The sea hath fish for every man.

Indians are born with an instinct for riding, rowing, hunting, fishing, and swimming. Americans are born with an instinct for fooling around with machines.

I am never, never, sick at sea. What never? No never! What never? Hardly ever.

I'd rather go fishing for three years.

I don't want problems solved for me. I want the fishing rod, not the fish.

Before exulatation had vanished, I felt as if I had been granted a marvellous privilege. Out of the inscrutable waters a beautiful fish had somehow leaped to show me fleetingly the life and spirit of his element.

A good rule of angling philosophy is not to interfere with any fishermans ways of being happy, unless you want to be hated.

There was never an angler who lived but that there was a fish capable of taking the conceit out of him.

Fishermen, no matter what supreme good fortune befalls them, cannot ever be absolutely satisfied. It is a fundamental weakness of intellect.

Far away Tongariro! Green - white thundering Athabasca river of New Zealand! I vowed I would come again down across the Pacific to fish in the swift cold waters of this most beautiful and famous of trout streams. It is something to have striven. It is much to have kept your word.

Fishing is a condition of the mind wherein one cannot have a bad time.

If I fished only to capture fish, my fishing trips would have ended long ago.

Finally from the crease of the ravine I am following, there begins to come the trickling and splashing of water. There is a great restfulness in the sounds these small streams make; they are going down as fast as they can, but their sound seem leisurely and idle, as if produced like gemstones with the greatest patience and care.

The river is of the earth and it is free. It is rigorously embanked and bound, and yet it is free. To hell with restraint, it says, I have got to be going. It will grind out its dams. It will go over or around them. They will become pieces.

Do unto those downstream as you would have those upstream do unto you.

What have we here? a man or a fish? dead or alive? A fish: he smells like a fish; a very ancient and fishlike smell; a kind of not of the newest poor-John. A strange fish!

'Twas merry when You wagered on your angling, when your diver Did hang a salt fish on his hook, which he With fervency drew up.

The pleasant'st angling is to see the fish Cut with her golden oars the silver stream And greedily devour the treacherous bait.

Give me mine angle, we'll to th' river: there, My music playing far off, I will betray Tawny-finned fishes. My bended hook shall pierce Their slimy jaws; and as I draw them up, I'll think them every one an Antony, And say, 'Ah, ha! are caught!'

Rock bottom; that's a fishing term.

I don't believe in rock bottom. Rock bottom is like a fishing term.

Often I have been exhausted on trout streams, uncomfortable, wet, cold, briar scarred, sunburned, mosquito bitten, but never, with a fly rod in my hand have I been less than in a place that was less than beautiful.

Fish and visitors smell in three days.

Many men go fishing their entire lives without knowing it is not fish they are after.

Many men go fishing all of their lives without knowing it is not fish they are after.

Time is but the stream I go fishing in. I drink at it, but while I drink I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is. It's thin current slides away, but eternity remains.

Advice is a form of nostalgia, dispensing it is a way of fishing the past from the disposal, wiping it off, painting over the ugly parts and recycling it for more than it's worth.

Bragging may not bring happiness, but no man having caught a large fish goes home through an alley.

Our plenteous streams a various race supply, The bright-eyed perch with fins of Tyrian dye, The silver eel, in shining volumes roll'd, The yellow carp, in scales bedropp'd with gold, Swift trouts, diversified with crimson stains, And pikes, the tyrants of the wat'ry plains.

Personally I am very fond of strawberries and cream, but I have found that for some strange reason, fish prefer worms. So when I went fishing, I didn’t think about what I wanted. I thought about what they wanted. I didn't bait the hook with strawberries and cream. Rather, I dangled a worm or grasshopper in front of the fish and said: "Wouldn't you like to have that?" Why not use the same common sense when fishing for people?

One fish. Two fish. Red fish. Blue fish. Black fish. Blue fish. Old fish. New fish. This one has a little star. This one has a little car. Say! What a lot of fish there are.

Give a man a fish and feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and feed him for a lifetime. Teach a man to cycle and he will realize fishing is stupid and boring.

Work: a dangerous disorder affecting high public functionaries who want to go fishing.

No better liar had there been in these parts as that ball player with hams for arms unless he be a man with a fishing rod and tackle box in his hands and his feet wet as rain.

Anglers have a way of romanticizing their battles with fish.

Perhaps I should not have been a fisherman, he thought. But that was the thing that I was born for.

It is a very good quality in a man to have a trout-stream.

I can't bear fishing. I think people look like fools sitting watching a line hour after hour-or else throwing and throwing, and catching nothing.

My best fishing-memory is about some fish that I never caught.

Instead of the scream of a fish hawk scaring the fishes, is heard the whistle of the steam-engine, arousing a country to its progress.

The fishermen say that the "thundering of the pond" scares the fishes and prevents their biting.

The sport of digging the bait is nearly equal to that of catching the fish, when one's appetite is not too keen.

Man needs to know but little more than a lobster in order to catch him in his traps.

It is good even to be a fisherman in summer and in winter.