"You must have a bladder like Lake Erie. I think empires rose and fell in the time it took you to pee. I could hear it the whole time." Thank you. Do you want something?"
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Lakes quotes
Lakes
749 quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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Lakes quotes (page 10 of 38)
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"To tell the truth, fishermen remain always boys as far as their amusement goes."
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"If there were fish in the lake, fishing would make no sense."
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"Her pupils have taken on a lonely hue, like grey clouds reflected in a calm lake."
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"Consciousness of a fact is not knowing it: if it were, the fish would know more of the sea than the geographers and the naturalists."
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"I can't bear fishing. I think people look like fools sitting watching a line hour after hour-or else throwing and throwing, and catching nothing."
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"When the going is good and the putts are dropping, you love your putter. When it's going bad, it's like it has betrayed you and you want to throw the sucker in a lake."
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"As a Canadian it's something you grow up with. Where I'm from in Canada the ground usually freezes in late October and the lake is frozen until late March. We learn to skate at a young age and I learned to skate when I was three. I was on an outdoor rink when I was three-years-old."
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"Sometimes we are clarified and calmed healthily, as we never were before in our lives, not by an opiate, but by some unconscious obedience to the all-just laws, so that we become like a still lake of purest crystal and without an effort our depths are revealed to ourselves. . . ."
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"Late in the afternoon we passed a man on the shore fishing with a long birch pole.... The characteristics and pursuits of various ages and races of men are always existing in epitome in every neighborhood. The pleasures of my earliest youth have become the inheritance of other men. This man is still a fisher, and belongs to an era in which I myself have lived."
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"I thought, as I have my living to get, and have not eaten today, that I might go a- fishing. That's the true industry for poets. It is the only trade I have learned."
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"I confess I was surprised to find that so many men spent their whole day, ay, their whole lives almost, a-fishing. It is remarkable what a serious business men make of getting their dinners, and how universally shiftlessness and a groveling taste take refuge in a merely ant-like industry. Better go without your dinner, I thought, than be thus everlastingly fishing for it like a cormorant. Of course, viewed from the shore, our pursuits in the country appear not a whit less frivolous."
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"The country is an archipelago of lakes,--the lake-country of New England."
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"While the very inhabitants of New England were thus fabling about the country a hundred miles inland, which was a terra incognitato them,... Champlain, the first Governor of Canada,... had already gone to war against the Iroquois in their forest forts, and penetrated to the Great Lakes and wintered there, before a Pilgrim had heard of New England."
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"Though the words Canada East on the map stretch over many rivers and lakes and unexplored wildernesses, the actual Canada, which might be the colored portion of the map, is but a little clearing on the banks of the river, which one of those syllables would more than cover."
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"Such a man has some right to fish, and I love to see nature carried out in him."
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"Who hears the fishes when they cry?"
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"English literature, from the days of the minstrels to the Lake Poets,--Chaucer and Spenser and Milton, and even Shakespeare, included,--breathes no quite fresh and, in this sense, wild strain. It is an essentially tame and civilized literature, reflecting Greece and Rome. Her wildness is a greenwood, her wild man a Robin Hood. There is plenty of genial love of Nature, but not so much of Nature herself. Her chronicles inform us when her wild animals, but not the wild man in her, became extinct."
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"Take my friends and my home - as an outcast I'll roam: Take the money I have in the bank: It is just what I wish, but deprive me of fish, And my life would indeed be blank."
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"There is a lake that one day refused to flow away and threw up a dam at the place where it had before flowed out and since then this lake has always risen higher and higher. Perhaps the very act of renunciation provides us with the strength to bear it ; perhaps man will rise ever higher and higher when he no longer flows out into a God."
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