Izaak Walton Quotes

I have laid aside business, and gone a'fishing.

Rivers and the inhabitants of the watery element were made for wise men to contemplate, and fools to pass by without consideration.

If you can't be content with what you have received, be thankful for what you have escaped.

God never did make a more calm, quiet, innocent recreation than angling.

God has two dwellings; one in heaven, and the other in a meek and thankful heart.

No life is so happy and so pleasant as the life of the well-govern'd angler.

Good company in a journey makes the way seem shorter.

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

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

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

You will find angling to be like the virtue of humanity, which has a calmness of spirit and a world of blessing attending upon it.

[Be grateful for the simple things in life. Don't take them for granted. After all...] What would a blind man give to see the pleasant rivers and meadows and flowers and fountains; and this and many other like blessings we enjoy daily.

The Waters are Nature's storehouse in which she locks up her wonders.

The person who loses their conscience has nothing left worth keeping.

Look to your health; and if you have it, praise God and value it next to conscience; for health is the second blessing that we mortals are capable of, a blessing money can't buy.

He directed that the stone over his grave be inscribed: Hic jacet hujus sententiae primus auctor: DISPUTANDI PRURITUS ECCLESIARUM SCABIES.

Blessings upon all that hate contention, and love quietnesse, and vertue, and Angling.

I am, Sir, a brother of the angle.

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

Doubt not but angling will prove to be so pleasant that it will prove to be, like virtue, a reward to itself.

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

If all the theories were correct, there wouldn't be a fish left in all of our lakes and rivers and streams.

Of this blest man, let his just praise be given, Heaven was in him, before he was in Heaven.

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

No man can lose what he never had.