Izaak Walton Quotes

39 Sourced Quotes

Thus use your frog... Put your hook through his mouth, and out at his gills;... and then with a fine needle and silk sew the upper part of his leg, with only one stitch, to the arming-wire of your hook; or tie the frog's leg, above the upper joint, to the armed-wire; and in so doing use him as though you loved him.

Izaak Walton
I have known a very good, fisher angle diligently four or six hours for a river carp, and not have a bite.

Izaak Walton
I remember that a wise friend of mine did usually say, "That which is everybody's business is nobody's business."

Izaak Walton
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.

Izaak Walton
I have laid aside business, and gone a-fishing.

Izaak Walton
Blessings we enjoy daily, and for most of them, because they be so common, we forget to pay our praises. But let not us, because it is a sacrifice so pleasing to Him who still protects us, and gives us flowers and showers and meat and content.

Izaak Walton
An honest ale-house where we shall find a cleanly room, lavender in the windows, and twenty ballads stuck about the wall.

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

Izaak Walton
It was wisely said, by a man of great observation, that there are as many miseries beyond riches as on this side of them.

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
I love such mirth as does not make friends ashamed to look upon one another next morning.

Izaak Walton
I shall stay him no longer than to wish him a rainy evening to read this following discourse; and that if he be an honest angler, the east wind may never blow when he goes a-fishing.

Izaak Walton
And though it is most certain, that two lutes being both strung and turned to an equal pitch, and then one played upon, the other will warble a faint audible harmony in answer to the same tune: yet many will not believe there is any such thing as sympathy of souls, and I am well pleased that every reader do enjoy his own opinion.

Izaak Walton
For love is a flattering mischief, that hath denied aged and wise men a foresight of those evils that too often prove to be the children of that blind father; a passion, that carries us to commit errors with as much ease as whirlwinds move feathers, and begets in us an unwearied industry to the attainment of what we desire.

Izaak Walton