Izaak Walton Quotes

Angling is somewhat like poetry, men are to be born so.

Angling is an art, and an art worth your learning.

Next to prayer, Fishing is the most personal relationship of man.

Fishing from a boat seems like dilettante bullshit - like hunting wild boar with a can of spray paint from the safety of a pick-up truck

Angling may be said to be so like the mathematics that it can never be fully learned.

As no man is born an artist, so no man is born an angler.

I got my ball-handling skills naturally. I know I can get better, and I will get better, but it's something I was born with.

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

Angling is extremely time consuming. That's sort of the whole point.

Talent you have naturally. Skill is only developed by hours and hours and hours of beating on your craft.

Or whipping its rough surface for a trout.

You can't say enough about fishing. Though the sport of kings, it's just what the deadbeat ordered.

See how he throws his baited lines about,/And plays his men as anglers play their trout.

For me, the life of the angler is an almost flawless example of how not to have a good time.

I thought, as I have my living to get, and have not eaten today, that I might go a- fishing. That's the true industry for poets. It is the only trade I have learned.

It [angling] deserves commendations;... it is an art worthy the knowledge and practice of a wise man.

There is no such thing as a natural boxer. A natural dancer has to practice hard. A natural painter has to paint all the time. Even a natural fool has to work at it.

O, sir, doubt not that Angling is an art; is it not an art to deceive a trout with an artificial fly?

I always tell girls who say they want to start a band but don't have any talent, well, neither do I. I mean, I can carry a tune, but anyone who picks up a bass can figure it out. You don't have to have magic unicorn powers. You work at it, and you get better. It's like anything- You sit there and do it every day, and eventually you get good at it.

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

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.

There is one distinctive charm about fishing - its fascinations will stand any climate. You may sit crouching on ice over a hole inside the arctic circle, or on a Windsor chair by the side of the River Lea in the so-called temperate zone, or you may squat in a canoe on an equatorial river, with the surrounding atmosphere forty-five percent mosquito, and if you are fishing you will enjoy yourself.

Fly-fishing may be a very pleasant amusement; but angling or float fishing I can only compare to a stick and a string, with a worm at one end and a fool at the other.

A farmer's got to be born, same as a fool. You can't make a corn pone out of flour dough by the twistin' of it.

If Mozart, instead of playing the pianoforte at three years old with wonderfully little practice, had played a tune with no practice at all, he might truly have been said to have done so instinctively.