Izaak Walton Quotes

John Jones may be described as 'one of the has beens'.

You will hear words old and spent and useless like costumes left over from yesterday's parties.

A fusty nut with no kernel.

You're anachronistic when you know that your feelings aren't going to have any effect on anything.

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

Fishing is such great fun, I have often felt, that it really ought to be done in bed

[On fishing:] Greatest rest in the world for the brain.

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

For me, fishing and journalism touched the same places in my head. In comparison with that of poets, the fly fishers' and the journalists' experiences are probably pale flavors, but they carry nonetheless a hint of ambrosia.

Fishing books , lit by emotion recollected in tranquility, are like poetry. .. . We do not think of them as books but as men. They are our companions and not only riverside. Summer and winter they are with us and what a pleasant company they are.

Trout fishing. One must be a stickler for proper form. Use nothing but #4 blasting caps, or a hand grenade, if handy, or at a pool well-lined with stone, one blast from a .44 magnum will bring a few stunned brookies quietly to the surface.

In our family, there was no clear line between religion and fly fishing.

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.

If to be old is not to be wise, then it is simply to be obsolete.

Popularity - a piece of faded tinsel, that is out of date.

The curious thing about fishing is you never want to go home. If you catch something, you can't stop. If you don't catch anything, you hate to leave in case something might bite.

The Roman rule was, to teach a boy nothing that he could not learn standing. The old English rule was, "All summer in the field, and all winter in the study." And it seems as if a man should learn to plant, or to fish, or to hunt, that he might secure his subsistence at all events, and not be painful to his friends and fellow men.

I love any discourse of rivers, and fish and fishing.

He told us about Christ's disciples being fisherman, and we were left to assume...that all great fishermen on the Sea of Galilee were fly fisherman and that John, the favorite, was a dry-fly fisherman.

It is utterly soothing to fly fish for trout. All other considerations or worries drift away and you couldn't keep them close if you wanted. Perhaps it's standing thigh deep in a river with the water passing at the exact but varying speed of life. You easily recognize this mortality and it dissipates into the landscape.

Try to catch a trout and experience the glorious feeling of letting it go and seeing it swimming away.

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

Or whipping its rough surface for a trout.

Around the steel no tortur'd worm shall twine, No blood of living insect stain my line; Let me, less cruel, cast the feather'd hook, With pliant rod athwart the pebbled brook, Silent along the mazy margin stray, And with the fur-wrought fly delude the prey.

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