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The solution to any problem -work, love, money, whatever -is to go fishing, and the worse the problem, the longer the trip should be.
Sep 10, 2025
If fishing is a religion, fly fishing is the high church.
Fly-fishing is the most fun you can have standing up.
There's more B.S. in fly fishing than there is in a Kansas feedlot.
Why does a salmon rise? Why does a small boy cross the street just to kick a tin can?
I'd rather go fishing for three years.
I go fishing not to find myself but to lose myself.
There are only two occasions when Americans respect privacy, especially in Presidents. Those are prayer and fishing.
I've gone fishing thousands of times in my life, and I have never once felt unlucky or poorly paid for those hours on the water.
Fly fishermen are born honest, but they get over it.
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.
Poets talk about "spots of time", but it is really the fishermen who experience eternity compressed into a moment. No one can tell what a spot of time is until suddenly the whole world is a fish and the fish is gone.
Many of us would probably be better fishermen if we did not spend so much time watching and waiting for the world to become perfect
But when they began handing out doctorates for comparative folk dancing and advanced fly-fishing, I became too stink in’ proud to use the title. I won’t touch watered whiskey and I take no pride in watered-down degrees.
Lots of people committed crimes during the year who would not have done so if they had been fishing. The increase of crime is among those deprived of the regenerations that impregnate the mind and character of the fisherman.
If we carry purism to it's logical conclusion, to do it right {fishing} you'd have to live naked in a cave, hit your trout on the head with rocks, and eat them raw. But, so as not to violate another essential element of the fly-fishing tradition, the rocks would have to be quarried in England and cost $300 each.
Fly fishing is not about catching the fish. It is about enjoying the water, the breeze, the fish swimming all around. If you catch one, good. If you don't...that is even better. That mean you come out and get to try all over again.
Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in. I drink at it; but while I drink I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is. Its thin current slides away, but eternity remains.
About the only certainty, other than uncertainty, in fly fishing is that a fly won't catch fish if it stays in its box.
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.
Fly fishing or any other sport fishing, is an end in itself and not a game or competition among fishermen. . . .
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 fished a little while ago with a man, not in his first youth, who had wasted the flower of his life on business and golf and gardening and motoring and marriage, and had in this way postponed his initiation (to fly fishing) far too long.
I imagine that no art has ever been learned from books. fly-fishing is no exception.
Fly-fishing is a magic way to recapture the rapture of solitude without the pangs of loneliness.
The fish is not so much your quarry as your partner.
Rivers and the inhabitants of the watery element were made for wise men to contemplate, and fools to pass by without consideration.
To paraphrase a deceased patriot, I regret that I have only one life to give to my fly-fishing.
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 used to like fishing because I thought it had some larger significance. Now I like fishing because it's the one thing I can think of that probably doesn't.
The best fisherman I know try not to make the same mistakes over and over again; instead they strive to make new and interesting mistakes and to remember what they learned from them.
In these sad and ominous days of mad fortune chasing, every patriotic, thoughtful citizen, whether he fishes or not, should lament that we have not among our countrymen more fishermen.
Most of the world is covered by water. A fisherman's job is simple: Pick out the best parts.
A trout is a moment of beauty known only to those who seek it.
Work: a dangerous disorder affecting high public functionaries who want to go fishing.
Man can learn a lot from fishing - when the fish are biting no problem in the world is big enough to be remembered.
The finest gift you can give to any fisherman is to put a good fish back, and who knows if the fish that you caught isn't someone else's gift to you?
They say you forget your troubles on a trout stream, but that's not quite it. What happens is that you begin to see where your troubles fit into the grand scheme of things, and suddenly they're just not such a big deal anymore.
Fly fishing is the most beautiful way of trying to catch a fish; not the most efficient, just as ballet is the most beautiful way of moving the body between between two points, not the most direct. Fly fishing is to fishing as ballet is to walking.
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.
...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.
When the word began to get out, the idea of tying imitations of aquatic worms was not met with universal approval in the fly-fishing community. It seems that worms had somehow gotten a bad name. I think a fishing pal of mine hit it on the head when he said, It just pisses them off that you can catch trout, I mean really big trout, on a fly that a five-year old can tie in twenty seconds!
The great charm of fly-fishing is that we are always learning.
Trout fisherman often give away their presence to the fish by the equipment they are wearing. The yo-yo hanging on the fly fishing vest that attaches to the hemostats or line clippers is often plated with chrome, giving off flashes of light. Some fly boxes that you wear on the chest are also bright aluminum-not a good idea. I recently fished with a fellow who wore a bright yellow hat on a meadow stream in Pennsylvania. From 100 yards away you could see his every movement,-I'm sure that trout near him could, too.
The only thing bad about winning the pennant is that you have to manage the All-Star Game the next year. I'd rather go fishing for three years.
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.
Fly-fishing is solitary, contemplative, misanthropic, scientific in some hands, poetic in others, and laced with conflicting aesthetic considerations. It's not even clear if catching fish is actually the point.
I don't know what's on the other side.
We do not know what is on the other side of the storm.
People who are in politics to be right all the time would be better off taking up fly-fishing. It's less dangerous. Politics that is not applied in the real world and doesn't address the real challenges and paradoxes and agonies is a hobby.