All you need to be a fisherman is patience and a worm.
Angling may be said to be so like the mathematics that it can never be fully learned.
Caution is a most valuable asset in fishing, especially if you are the fish.
Fishing is a delusion entirely surrounded by liars in old clothes.
Fishing seems to be the favorite form of loafing.
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.
If fishing is a religion, fly fishing is high church.
No human being, however great, or powerful, was ever so free as a fish.
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.
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.
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.
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.