It is quite easy to debase the sport, change its values, dilute its ethics and destroy its traditional associations with quietness, relaxation and the opportunity to think. Angling is not a competitive sport. The fisherman'- s only real competition is with his quarry and his only real challenge is the challenge to himself. Nothing can add to this, but the blight of interhuman competition can certainly detract from it.

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

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

Anglers...exaggerate grossly and make gentle and inoffensive creatures sound like wounded buffalo and man-eating tigers.

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.

... To this day I would rather see a fish, creep up to him and watch his rise to my fly than catch half a dozen fish unseen until they take.

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.