If you can't be content with what you have received, be thankful for what you have escaped.

Blessings we enjoy daily, and for the most of them, because they be so common, men forget to pay their praises. [and miss much of their benefits from grateful appreciation]

You will find angling to be like the virtue of humanity, which has a calmness of spirit and a world of blessing attending upon it.

Good company and good discourse are the very sinews of virtue.

So long as thou are ignorant be not ashamed to learn. Ignorance is the greatest of all infirmities, and when justified, the chiefest of all follies.

Angling may be said to be so like the Mathematics that it can never be fully learnt; at least not so fully but that there will still be more new experiments left for the trial of other men that succeed us.

As no man is born an artist, so no man is born an angler.