Quotes and text excerpts about "fish"

“ A very strange, helpless-looking object is the star fish. They are often left by the tide on the beach and are perfectly helpless until another tide carries them back. A flying fish fell on deck of the transport and was picked up, greatly exciting our curiosity. This strange little animal never gets more than a few inches long. These fish go in schools; sometimes a school is so large that it covers half an acre or more, skipping or flying along on the surface of the water sometimes one hundred yards before striking the water again. ”

“ A game fish may be defined as one that will make a good fight for its life and that is caught by scientific methods of angling. Almost any fish will struggle to escape the hook, but generally by game fish we understand that in fresh water the salmon, bass, or trout family is referred to. Pickerel and pike are also game fish, but in some sections they are considered undesirable because they rarely rise to the fly, which is the most scientific method of fishing.
A fisherman who is a real sportsman always uses tackle as light as he can with safety and still have a chance of landing the fish. ”

“ The food of fish differs according to their species. Some feed on mud; others eat sea weed; others content themselves with the herbs that grow in water. But the greater part devour each other, and the smaller is food for the larger, and if one which has possessed itself of a fish weaker than itself becomes a prey to another, the conqueror and the conquered are both swallowed up in the belly of the last. And we mortals, do we act otherwise when we press our inferiors? ”

“ The more we pray, the more we wish to pray. Like a fish which at first swims on the surface of the water, and afterwards plunges down, and is always going deeper, the soul plunges, dives, and loses itself in the sweetness of conversing with God. Time never seems long in prayer. I know not whether we can even wish for Heaven? Oh, yes!. . . The fish swimming in a little rivulet is well off, because it is in its element; but it is still better in the sea. When we pray, we should open our heart to God, like a fish when it sees the wave coming. The good God has no need of us. ”

“ If we fish in waters known to us, we may be pretty sure of what we shall not get, but even in our most familiar creeks and rivers, who can say that the fish which is tugging at our line is certainly a perch, a cat-fish, or an eel? We know that we shall not pull up a shad or a salmon, but there is always a chance for some of those great prizes which are to be found, by rare good luck, in every river and good-sized stream; a rock-fish, or striped-bass perhaps, or a pike, or enormous chub. ”

“ A large fish very seldom rises with any dash or swagger, but just a smothered ripple; perhaps a glimpse of his nose as he sucks in the fly; and he moves as if he were a nobody: then when he feels the hook, there is none of that dash and wriggle that you find in a small fish, but generally a rush like a rocket towards the middle of the lake, making you tremble for the safety of your reel line, and after that a stately diving and calm, dignified resistance for five or ten minutes till he has to give in. ”

“ The good man will never slay fish wantonly. We creatures of God on the earth together should enjoy each other, and the beautiful world, which is ours alike.
Because man is the wisest of all, with greatest power of knowledge and capacity for happiness, it is all the more incumbent on him to preserve the world as fair as he found it, and to respect the rights so far as may be of every other man and beast. ”

“ In cold, frosty, snowy weather, I know the fish must eat in all seasons, and that a man may kill fish when he must first break the ice; yet I conceive the sport is not then worth pursuing, the extreme cold taking away the delight, besides the endangering health, if not life, by those colds, which at least cause rhumes and coughs: wherefore I leave Winter and night angling, to such strong healthful bodies, whose extraordinary delight in angling, or those whose necessity enforceth them to seek profit by their recreation, in such unseasonable times. ”

“ There’s a noble disposition in a fish-hawk: they are industrious, work hard for a living, and maintain their families by their own labor; they won’t pick up a dead fish, or eel, or feed on a dead horse or cow, like an eagle or carrion crow, but will have a live fish, that they have taken fresh from the sea; they won’t be beholden to chance, nor anybody, for their living, but earn it, as every honest person should, in the sweat of their face. ”

“ Do not fish with too long a line, unless, indeed, on an exceptional occasion, when you wish to reach the lie of a feeding fish. It is difficult to define a long line, but a good general rule is that it should never be longer than when you have the consciousness that, if a fish should rise, you have him at a fair and instantaneous striking distance. Remember that the time the flies first touch the water after each cast is the most deadly; therefore, cast often.
If you have only the share of a boat, the rule is that one man takes the stern up till lunch, and the other after it. ”

“ A rural poacher is infinitely preferable. The difference in the ways of fish when they have been much disturbed and when they have been let alone is at at once discerned. No sooner do you approach a fish who has been much annoyed and driven than he strikes, and a quick-rotating curl on the surface shows with what vehemence his tail was forced against it. In other places, if a fish perceives you, he gives himself so slight a propulsion that the curl hardly rises, and you can see him gliding slowly into the deeper or overshadowed water. ”

“ The better sort of fish are out of season. The trout are lean and haggard: it is no trick to catch them and no treat to eat them. The salmon, all except the silly kelts, have run out to sea, and the place of their habitation no man knoweth. There is nothing for the angler to do but wait for the return of spring, and meanwhile encourage and sustain his patience with such small consolations in kind as a friendly Providence may put within his reach.
Some solace may be found, on a day of crisp, wintry weather, in the childish diversion of catching pickerel through the ice. ”

“ The most wonderful of all coral is that found in the coral reefs, which are so old that the most ancient fish in all fishdom, or his great-grandfather before him, could not tell when they were begun; and so hard and enduring that the storms of centuries have never been able to destroy them. But strong as they are, the mighty ocean, (both friend and foe to the coral) , is still stronger, and in time the constant washing and beating of the tides wear away portions of the hard rock, changes the formation of the reefs, and helps in a large measure in the making of the lovely coral islands. ”

“ The least suggestive spot in the world to most people is a mud-hole. The common impression seems to be that fish avoid it, that frogs and birds pass it by, and plants decline to cover its nakedness. This, like a great many other common impressions, is really very wide of the mark. If the water be not unutterably filthy, fish will condescend to tenant the shallow depths, frogs will thrive therein, bitterns and the little rail-bird find such a spot attractive, and many an aquatic plant grows nowhere else so vigorously. ”

“ Young people love angling extremely; then there is a boat, which gives pleasure enough in summer, frequent fishing with nets, the very making of nets, seeing the waters, much discourse of them, and the fish, especially upon your great sweeps, and the strange surprizes that will happen in numbers and bigness, with many other incident entertainments, are the result of waters, and direct the minds of a numerous family to terminate in something not inconvenient, and, it may be, divert them from worse. ”

“ Striking, to my mind, is by far the most important point, and hundreds of fish have I seen escape for want of quickness. It must be done quickly but steadily, and not with a jerk, as the latter is apt, by the double action of the rod, to bend the tip forward, and loosen instead of tightening the line. There are days when fish cannot be struck, although they are rising freely. Whether they are playing or over-cautious, I never could determine; whether they are not hungry, or the water is too clear, they put a man’s capacities at defiance. ”

“ Next to being an expert, it is well to be a contented duffer: a man who would fish if he could, and who will pleasure himself by flicking off his flies, and dreaming of impossible trout, and smoking among the sedges Hope’s enchanted cigarettes. ”

“ Man is Nature's last and most wonderful creation. He has learned to fly like the birds, to swim under the sea like the fish, and to harness Nature's forces and make them work for him. But man, with all his wisdom, has too often forgotten that he is really a brother to the lower creatures. ”

“ At present the love of the sea gardens is an esoteric pleasure, some day we hope it may become as universal as the love of wild nature inland. Corals to take the place of plants, fishes and lower animals of all kinds, beautiful, bizarre, useful and poisonous, making gardens of teeming life under water, where the very worms are often beautiful as flowers. In the harbours where the water is stagnant, but clearer than any British sea, besides corals are weeds of all kinds and shapes, among which swim numbers of little fish of comical form, quaintly tame and gorgeously coloured. ”

“ One half of all Art was acquisitive: one half of the acquisitive Art was conquest or taking by force: half of this again was hunting, and half of hunting was hunting animals: of this again the under half was fishing, and half of fishing was striking: a part of striking was fishing with a barb, and one half of this again (being the kind which strikes with a hook and draws the fish from below upwards) is the Art we have been seeking, and which from the nature of the operation is denoted Angling or drawing up. ”

“ I certainly never heard of any one falling in love with a salmon in such a way as to regard it as a fond companion. And this may be one reason why no sensible person who has tried fishing has ever been able to see any cruelty in it.
Suppose the fish is not caught by an angler, what is his alternative fate? He will either perish miserably in the struggles of the crowded net, or die of old age and starvation like the long, lean stragglers which are sometimes found in the shallow pools, or be devoured by a larger fish, or torn to pieces by a seal or an otter. ”

“ The fact is, that care and labor are as much correlated to human existence as shadow is to light; there is no such thing as excluding them from any mortal lot. You may make a canary-bird or a gold-fish live in absolute contentment without a care or labor, but a human being you cannot. Human beings are restless and active in their very nature, and will do something, and that something will prove a care, a labor, and a fatigue, arrange it how you will. ”

“ Fine, bright hot days without wind are the best, both on river and lake; cold and rainy days are always bad, a fortunate thing, as such days are very uncommon. Strong wind is, oddly enough, the greatest enemy of the angler, especially on the lakes; it nearly always puts the fish down. The only thing that seems to account for these curious facts is the probability that the stone fly and other flies are not hatched out except on hot days, while the fish are regardless of the gleam of the gut in the water. My own experience has always been that the hottest days are the best. ”

“ There is a wilding strain in our blood that all the civilization in the world will not eradicate. I never knew a real boy—or, for that matter, a girl worth knowing—who would not rather climb a tree, any day, than walk up a golden stairway.
It is a touch of this instinct, I suppose, that makes it more delightful to fish in the most insignificant of free streams than in a carefully stocked and preserved pond, where the fish are brought up by hand and fed on minced liver. Such elaborate precautions to ensure good luck extract all the spice from the sport of angling. ”

“ I could not become a soldier as I learned that Eurasians were not accepted. In fact I had no liking whatever for the army, even had there been an opening for me. I always had a repugnance to taking life. I could not see a chicken killed without a sense of pain and to see a gasping fish just taken from the water gave me a shock. In my life I have gone out shooting and the more birds I killed, the greater the burden of sorrow I carried home, thinking of the number of lives I had destroyed when God had created them as well as me and that they had as much right as I to live. ”

“ Good luck, that synonym for all the virtues, does not depend so much upon the kind of flies as the skill in casting, and a poor fly lightly cast into the right spot will do better execution than the best fly roughly cast into the wrong place. The lure must be put where the fish habit, often before their very noses, or they will not take it; and when they lie, as they generally do in running streams, in the deep holes under the banks, where the bushes are closest and cause the densest shade, it requires some skill to cast properly into the exact spot. ”

“ The Thames smelts are the best and sweetest, for two reasons; they are fresher and richer than any other you can get: they catch them much more plentiful and larger in Lancashire and Norfolk, but not so good: a great many are brought to town from Norfolk, but barely come good, as they are a fish which should always be eaten fresh; indeed, all river fish should be eaten fresh, except salmon, which, unless crimped, eats better the second or third day: but all Thames fish, particularly, should be eaten very fresh; no fish eats so bad kept. ”

“ Man is but a feeble creature, and if he had to depend on his own bodily strength alone he could make no head against even the ordinary brutes in this world. But the knowledge which has been given to him by his Maker has clothed man with great power, so that he is more than a match for the fiercest beast in the forest, or the largest fish in the sea. Yet, with all his knowledge, with all his experience, and all his power, the killing of a great old sperm whale costs man a long, tough battle, sometimes it even costs him his life. ”

“ Africa may have some charms, but it certainly is rather a trying country; in the rainy weather we have the impenetrable high grass, the flies, and the mud; when those entertainments are over, and the grass has ripened, every variety of herb and bush is more or less armed with lances, swords, daggers, bayonets, knives, spikes, needles, pins, fish-hooks, hay-forks, harpoons, and every abomination in the shape of points which render a leather suit indispensable to a sportsman, even in this hot climate. ”

“ The great panorama of life is interesting because it moves. One change involves another, and everything which co-exists, co-depends. This co-existence and inter-dependence causes us not only to study ourselves, but everything around us. By discovering natural laws we are permitted in God’s good providence to harness and yoke natural powers, and already the giant Steam drags along at incredible speed the rumbling car and swiftly gliding boat; the quadruped has been literally outraced on the land, and the fish in the sea; each has been, so to speak, beaten in its own domain. ”

“ No human being, however great or powerful, was ever so free as a fish. ”

“ PROVERBS An avaricious man, who can never get enough, is like a snake trying to swallow an elephant.
To draw the picture of a tiger, and make a dog out of it, is to imitate a masterpiece and spoil it.
Human pleasures are like the flittings of sparrows.
A narrow-minded man resembles a frog in a well.
Do not pull up your stockings in a melon-patch, or straighten your hat in a peach orchard; any one seeing you may think you are stealing.
To talk much and arrive nowhere is the same as climbing a tree to catch a fish.
One thread does not make a rope. ”