Recipe For Greatness – To bear up under loss; To fight the bitterness of defeat and the weakness of grief; To be victor over anger; To smile when tears are close; To resist disease and evil men and base instincts; To hate hate and to love love; To go on when it would seen good to die; To look up with unquenchable faith in something ever more about to be. That is what any man can do, and be great.
If I fished only to capture fish, my fishing trips would have ended long ago.
Never insult seven men when all your packing is a six-shooter.
There are always greater fish than you have caught, always the lure
of greater task and achievement, always the inspiration to seek, to endure,
to find.
At the end of the day faith is a funny thing. It turns up when you don’t really expect it. Its like one day you realize that the fairy tale may be slightly different than you dreamed. The castle, well, it may not be a castle. And its not so important happy ever after, just that its happy right now. See once in a while, once in a blue moon, people will surprise you , and once in a while people may even take your breath away.
Love of man for woman–love of woman for man. That’s the nature, the meaning, the best of life itself.
Fishing is a condition of mind wherein you cannot possibly have a bad time.
The difficulty, the ordeal, is to start.
Men may rise on stepping stones of their dead selves to higher things.
There was never an angler who lived but that there was a fish capable of taking the conceit out of him.
I will see this game of life out to its bitter end
I need this wild life, this freedom.
I hope I have found myself, my work, my happiness – under the light of the western skies.
I arise full of eagerness and energy, knowing well what achievement lies ahead of me.
I can write best in the silence and solitude of the night, when everyone has retired.
Fishermen, no matter what supreme good fortune befalls them, cannot ever be absolutely satisfied. It is a fundamental weakness of intellect.
Far away Tongariro! Green – white thundering Athabasca river of New Zealand! I vowed I would come again down across the Pacific to fish in the swift cold waters of this most beautiful and famous of trout streams. It is something to have striven. It is much to have kept your word.
What is writing but an expression of my own life?
Love grows more tremendously full, swift, poignant, as the years multiply.
Work is my salvation. It changes my moods.
What makes life worth living? Better surely, to yield to the stain of suicide blood in me and seek forgetfulness in the embrace of cold dark death.
Before exulatation had vanished, I felt as if I had been granted a marvellous privilege. Out of the inscrutable waters a beautiful fish had somehow leaped to show me fleetingly the life and spirit of his element.
It was a decent New Year’s, but it took a million officers to make it so.
Writing was like digging coal. I sweat blood. The spell is on me.
Realism is death to me. I cannot stand life as it is.
