Quotes
Quotes about Fish
Meagre were his looks, Sharp misery had worn him to the bones; And in his needy shop a tortoise hung, An alligator stuffed, and other skins Of ill-shaped fishes; and about his shelves A beggarly account of boxes, Green earthen pots, bladders, and musty seeds, Remnants of packthread, and old cakes of roses Were thinly scattered, to make up a show.
Modesty is the only sure bait when you are fishing for praise.
In our family, there was no clear line between religion and fly fishing. We lived at the junction of great trout rivers in western Montana, and our father was a Presbyterian minister and a fly fisherman who tied his own flies and taught others. He told us about Christ's disciples being fishermen, and we were to assume, as my brother and I did, that all first-class fishermen on the Sea of Galilee were fly fishermen and that John, the favorite, was a dry-fly fisherman.
Of course, now I am too old to be much of a fisherman, and now of course I usually fish the big waters alone, although some friends think I shouldn't. Like many fly fishermen in western Montana where the summer days are almost Arctic in length, I often do not start fishing until the cool of the evening. Then in the Arctic half-light of the canyon, all existence fades to a being with my soul and memories and the sounds of the Big Blackfoot River and a four-count rhythm and the hope that a fish will rise.
Their monument sticks like a fishbone in the city's throat.
The aim of morality is to give people a standard of action and a motive to work by which, they will not intensify each person's selfishness, but raise them up above it.
We are all selfish and I no more trust myself than others with a good motive.
I don't feel we did wrong in taking this great country away from them. There were great numbers of people who needed new land, and the Indians were selfishly trying to keep it for themselves.
Fragments came floating into his mind like bits of wood drifting down a stream, and he fished them out and fitted them together.
The ordinary corporation is a person for purposes of the adjudicatory processes, whether it represents proprietary, spiritual, aesthetic, or charitable causes. So it should be as respects valleys, alpine meadows, rivers, lakes, estuaries, beaches, ridges, groves of trees, swampland, or even air that feels the destructive pressures of modern technology and modern life. The river, for example, is the living symbol of all the life it sustains or nourishes - fish, aquatic insects, water ouzels, otter, fisher, deer, elk, bear, and all other animals, including man, who are dependent on it or who enjoy it for its sight, its sound, or its life. The river as plaintiff speaks for the ecological unit of life that is part of it.
The great fishpond (the sea).
Fishes live in the sea, as men do a-land; the great ones eat up the little ones.
The line of red are lines of blood, nobly and unselfishly shed by men who loved the liberty of their fellowmen more than they loved their fellowmen more than they lover their own lives and fortunes. God forbid that we would have to use the blood of America to freshen the color of the flag. But if it should ever be necessary, that flag will be colored once more, and in being colored will be glorified and purified.
Plato divinely calls pleasure the bait of evil, inasmuch as men are caught by it as fish by a hook. [Lat., Divine Plato escam malorum appeliat voluptatem, quod ea videlicet homines capiantur, ut pisces hamo.]
The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.
...the crimes of violence committed for selfish, personal motives are historically insignificant compared to those committed ad majorem gloriam Dei, out of a self-sacrificing devotion to the flag, a leader, a religious faith or political conviction.
I think most historians will agree that the part played by impulses of selfish, individual aggression in the holocausts of history was small; first and foremost, the slaughter was meant as an offering to the gods, to king and country, or the future happiness of mankind. The crimes of Caligula shrink to insignificance compared to the havoc wrought by Torquemada. The number of victims of robbers, highwaymen, rapists, gangsters and other criminals at any period of history is negligible compared to the massive numbers of those cheerfully slain in the name of the true religion, just policy, or correct ideology.
...we are apt to forget that the vast majority of men and women who fell under the totalitarian spell was activated by unselfish motives, ready to accept the role of martyr or executioner, as the cause demanded.
Those who live to the future must always appear selfish to those who live to the present.
Modern Americans are so exposed, peered at, inquired about, and spied upon as to be increasingly without privacy--members of a ;naked society and denizens of a goldfish bowl.
Neither fish, flesh nor good red herring.
The hatred and cruelty which have their source in selfishness are ineffectual things compared with the venom and ruthlessness born of selflessness.
To be truly selfish one needs a degree of self-esteem. The self-despisers are less intent on their own increase than on the diminution of others. Where self-esteem is unattainable, envy takes the place of greed.
It needs some intelligence to be truly selfish. The unintelligent can only be self-righteous.
Reason is a supple nymph, and slippery as a fish by nature. She had as leave give her kiss to an absurdity any day, as to syllogistic truth. The absurdity may turn out truer.
