If fishing is a religion, fly fishing is high church.
Somebody just back of you while you are fishing is as bad as someone looking over your shoulder while you write a letter to your girl.
Fishing seems to be the favorite form of loafing.
Some people are under the impression that all that is required to make a good fisherman is the ability to tell lies easily and without blushing; but this is a mistake. Mere bald fabrication is useless; the veriest tyro can manage that. It is in the circumstantial detail, the embellishing touches of probability, the general air of scrupulous -- almost of pedantic -- veracity, that the experienced angler is seen.
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.
Fishing is a delusion entirely surrounded by liars in old clothes.
No human being, however great, or powerful, was ever so free as a fish.
All you need to be a fisherman is patience and a worm.
The perch swallows the grub-worm, the pickerel swallows the perch, and the fisherman swallows the pickerel; and so all the chinks in the scale of being are filled.
Caution is a most valuable asset in fishing, especially if you are the fish.
Angling may be said to be so like the mathematics that it can never be fully learned.
We may say of angling, as Dr. Boteler said of strawberries, Doubtless God could have made a better berry, but doubtless God never did; and so, if I might be judge, God never did make a more calm, quiet, innocent recreation than angling.