I still don't know why I fish or why other men fish, except that we like it and it makes us think and feel.

A fisherman is always hopeful -- nearly always more hopeful than he has any right to be.

A river is water is its loveliest form; rivers have life and sound and movement and infinity of variation, rivers are veins of the earth through which the lifeblood returns to the heart

Perhaps fishing is, for me, only an excuse to be near rivers.

A man should think when he fishing of all manner and shape of things, flowing as easily through the mind as the light stream among the rocks

I have been, all my life, what is known as a conservationist. It seems clear beyond possibility of argument that any given generation of men can have only a lease, not ownership, of the earth; and one essential term of the lease is that the earth be handed down on to the next generation with unimpaired potentialities. This is the conservationist's concern.

I have two hopes for the future. The first and lesser one is that game commissions will one day have sense enough to set limits that measurably reflect the sport safely available. The second and deeply urgent one is that we shall grow a race of sportsmen no one of whom will ever consider it a matter of pride to have killed a limit.