Idle time not idly spent. [ Sir Henry Wotton ]
Angling is an innocent cruelty. [ George Parker ]
It is ill angling after the net. [ Proverb ]
The first men that our Saviour dear
Did choose to wait upon Him here,
Blest fishers were; and fish the last
Food was, that He on earth did taste:
I therefore strive to follow those,
Whom He to follow Him hath chose. [ Izaak Walton ]
O! the gallant fisher's life.
It is the best of any:
'Tis full of pleasure, void of strife
And 'tis beloved by many.
Other joys
Are but toys;
Only this,
Lawful is;
For our skill
Breeds no ill,
But content and pleasure. [ Izaak Walton ]
But should you lure
From his dark haunt, beneath the tangled roots
Of pendent trees, the monarch of the brook,
Behooves you then to ply your finest art. [ Thomson ]
In genial spring, beneath the quivering shade,
Where cooling vapors breathe along the mead,
The patient fisher takes his silent stand.
Intent, his angle trembling in his hand;
With looks unmoved, he hopes the scaly breed.
And eyes the dancing cork and bending reed. [ Pope ]
The end of fishing is not angling but catching. [ Proverb ]
Angling is somewhat like poetry; men are to be born so. [ Izaak Walton ]
Angling is a line with a bait at the one end and a fool at the other. [ Franklin ]
The man who prates about the cruelty of angling will be found invariably to beat his wife. [ Christopher North ]
Everything appertaining to the angler's art is cowardly, cruel, treacherous, and cat-like. [ Chatfield ]
I have known a very good fisher angle diligently four or six hours for a river carp, and not have a bite. [ Izaak Walton ]
Doubt not but angling will prove to be so pleasant, that it will prove to be, like virtue, a reward to itself. [ Izaak Walton ]
The pleasantest angling is to see the fish cut with her golden oars the silver stream, and greedily devour the treacherous bait. [ William Shakespeare ]
You will find angling to be like the virtue of humility, which has a calmness of spirit and a world of other blessings attending upon it. [ Izaac Walton ]
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. [ Izaak Walton ]
We really cannot see what equanimity there is in jerking a lacerated carp out of the water by the jaws, merely because it has not the power of making a noise; for we presume that the most philosophic of anglers would hardly delight in catching shrieking fish. [ Leigh Hunt ]
Though no participator in the joys of more vehement sport, I have a pleasure that I cannot reconcile to my abstract notions of the tenderness due to dumb creatures, in the tranquil cruelty of angling. I can only palliate the wanton destructiveness of my amusement by trying to assure myself that my pleasure does not spring from the success of the treachery I practice toward a poor little fish, but rather from that innocent revelry in the luxuriance of summer life which only anglers enjoy to the utmost. [ Bulwer-Lytton ]