These trout quotes will inspire you. Trout are species of freshwater fish belonging to the genera Oncorhynchus, Salmo, and Salvelinus, all of the subfamily Salmoninae of the family Salmonidae.
A collection of motivating, happy, and encouraging trout quotes, trout sayings, and trout proverbs.
Best Trout Quotes
- “Often I have been exhausted on trout streams, uncomfortable, wet, cold, briar scarred, sunburned, mosquito bitten, but never, with a fly rod in my hand have I been less than in a place that was less than beautiful.” ~ Charles Kuralt
- “A trout is a moment of beauty known only to those who seek it.” ~ Arnold Gingrich
- “If you want to catch trout, don’t fish in a herring barrel.” ~ Ann Landers
- “Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it.” ~ Norman Maclean
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“O, sir, doubt not that Angling is an art; is it not an art to deceive a trout with an artificial fly?” ~ Izaak Walton
- “Many men go fishing all of their lives without knowing that it is not fish they are after.” ~ Henry David Thoreau
- “A street thug and a paid killer are professionals – beasts of prey, if you will, who have dissociated themselves from the rest of humanity and can now see human beings in the same way that trout fishermen see trout.” ~ Willard Gaylin
- “Wherever the trout are, it’s beautiful.” ~ Tomas Garrigue Masaryk
- “Fishing is a… discipline in the equality of men – for all men are equal before fish.” ~ Herbert Hoover
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“Angling is extremely time consuming. That’s sort of the whole point.” ~ Thomas McGuane
- “It is impossible to grow weary of a sport that is never the same on any two days of the year.” ~ Theodore Gordon
- “Angling may be said to be so like the mathematics that it can never be fully learned.” ~ Izaak Walton
- “I grew up a Phillies fan. Me and my buddies tailgated a couple of times when they won the World Series. I like just being in that atmosphere.” ~ Mike Trout
- “To go fishing is the chance to wash one’s soul with pure air, with the rush of the brook, or with the shimmer of sun on blue water. It brings meekness and inspiration from the decency of nature, charity toward tackle-makers, patience toward fish, a mockery of profits and egos, a quieting of hate, a rejoicing that you do not have to decide a darned thing until next week. And it is discipline in the equality of men – for all men are equal before fish.” ~ Herbert Hoover
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“Technology is ruled by two types of people: those who manage what they do not understand, and those who understand what they do not manage.” ~ Mike Trout
- “Glory be to God for dappled things.” ~ Gerard Manley Hopkins
- “The charm of fishing is that it is the pursuit of what is elusive but attainable, a perpetual series of occasions for hope.” ~ John Buchan
- “The finest gift you can give to any fisherman is to put a good fish back, and who knows if the fish that you caught isn’t someone else’s gift to you?” ~ Lee Wulff
- “If I fished only to capture fish, my fishing trips would have ended long ago.” ~ Zane Grey
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“I go fishing not to find myself but to lose myself.” ~ Joseph Monninger
- “I think I fish, in part, because it’s an anti-social, bohemian business that, when gone about properly, puts you forever outside the mainstream culture without actually landing you in an institution.” ~ John Gierach
- “To me heaven would be a big bull ring with me holding two barrera seats and a trout stream outside that no one else was allowed to fish in and two lovely houses in the town; one where I would have my wife and children and be monogamous and love them truly and well and the other where I would have my nine beautiful mistresses on nine different floors.” ~ Ernest Hemingway
- “They say you forget your troubles on a trout stream, but that’s not quite it. What happens is that you begin to see where your troubles fit into the grand scheme of things, and suddenly they’re just not such a big deal anymore.” ~ John Gierach
- “I fish because I love to . . . because I love the environs where trout are found . . . because I suspect that men are going along this way for the last time, and I for one don’t want to waste the trip . . . and, finally, not because I regard fishing as being so terribly important but because I suspect that so many of the other concerns of men are equally unimportant––and not nearly so much fun.” ~ John D. Voelker
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“You must lose a fly to catch a trout.” ~ George Herbert
- “There’s no taking trout with dry breeches.” ~ Miguel de Cervantes
- “Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it. The river was cut by the world’s great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. On some of the rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs. I am haunted by waters.” ~ Norman Maclean
- “Circumstantial evidence is occasionally very convincing, as when you find a trout in the milk, to quote Thoreau’s example.” ~ Arthur Conan Doyle
- “What are more delightful than one’s emotions when approaching a trout stream for the initial cast?” ~ Nash Buckingham
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“What’s his offense? Groping for trout in a peculiar river.” ~ William Shakespeare
- “The solution to any problem -work, love, money, whatever -is to go fishing, and the worse the problem, the longer the trip should be.” ~ John Gierach
- “There is certainly something in angling that tends to produce a serenity of the mind.” ~ Washington Irving
- “All good things come by grace, and grace comes by art, and art does not come easy.” ~ Norman Maclean
- “The great charm of fly-fishing is that we are always learning.” ~ Theodore Gordon
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“Creeps and idiots cannot conceal themselves for long on a fishing trip.” ~ John Gierach
- “Some circumstantial evidence is very strong, as when you find a trout in the milk.” ~ Henry David Thoreau
- “All men are equal before fish.” ~ Herbert Hoover
- “My father was very sure about certain matters pertaining to the universe. To him all good things-trout, as well as eternal salvation come by grace and grace, comes by art and art does not come easy.” ~ Norman Maclean
- “There is a lot of amiable fantasy written about trout fishing, but the truth is that few men know much if anything about the habits of trout and little more about the manner of taking them.” ~ John D. Voelker
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“Game fish are too valuable to be caught only once.” ~ Lee Wulff
- “The trout that seem to stick in my memory the finest aren’t the big ones, and maybe it’s because I have’t visited all the corners of the globe, but my most unforgettable trout all lived close to home. In fact, when I take out my pouch of trout memories and spill them all on the table, it seems that the smaller ones shine the brightest.” ~ William G. Tapply
- “Successful trout fishing isn’t a matter of brute force or even persistence, but something more like infiltration.” ~ John Gierach
- “I love cooking all different things, so any form of meat, fish, anything else. I do have a really strict diet, but it’s all protein and veg basically. When you are on a diet like that you have to get inventive, so you have to be willing to try any different fish that’s out there. Probably a favourite of mine is some baked trout fillets, on a salad.” ~ Greg Rutherford
- “On a hot day in Virginia, I know nothing more comforting than a fine spiced pickle, brought up trout-like from the sparkling depths of the aromatic jar below the stairs of Aunt Sally’s cellar.” ~ Thomas Jefferson
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“If we become conceited through great success, someday the trout will take us down a peg.” ~ Theodore Gordon
- “Catching fish is not a mental game between fish and angler. A ‘smart’ trout is only smarter than other trout, not smarter than a fisherman. An angler must take the puzzle of the day’s conditions, and matching those conditions and his knowledge of the fish come up with a good catch. He competes with a concept, not with a fish’s brain.” ~ Lee Wulff
- “I fished upstream coming ever closer and closer to the narrow staircase of the canyon. Then I went up into it as if I were entering a department store. I caught three trout in the lost and found department.” ~ Richard Brautigan
- “It’s certain there are trout somewhere – And maybe I shall take a trout – but I do not seem to care.” ~ William Butler Yeats
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“It shook up Trout to realize that even he could bring evil into the world — in the form of bad ideas.” ~ Kurt Vonnegut
- “Kilgore Trout once wrote a short story which was a dialogue between two pieces of yeast. They were discussing the possible purposes of life as they ate sugar and suffocated in their own excrement. Because of their limited intelligence, they never came close to guessing that they were making champagne.” ~ Kurt Vonnegut
- “The trout in yonder wimpling burn – That glides, a silver dart, – And, safe beneath the shady thorn, – Defies the anglers art.” ~ Robert Burns
- “It is a very good quality in a man to have a trout-stream.” ~ George Eliot
- “…there are few things deader than a dead brown trout stream.” ~ Ed Zern
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“Try to catch a trout and experience the glorious feeling of letting it go and seeing it swimming away.” ~ Billy Connolly
- “Before we go there and set up greenhouses, dance clubs, and falafel stands, let’s make sure that, in some subtle form that could be harmed by the human hubbub, life does not already exist there. If not, then by all means build cities, plant forests and fill lakes and streams with trout — bring life to Mars and Mars to life. We’ll then be the Martians we’ve been dreaming about for all these years.” ~ David Grinspoon
- “As a child of eight Mr. Trout had once kissed a girl of six under the mistletoe at a Christmas party, but there his sex life had come to abrupt halt.” ~ P. G. Wodehouse
- “Glory be to God for dappled things-
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced-fold, fallow, and plough;
And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim. - All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
Praise him.” ~ Gerard Manley Hopkins -
“A trout fisherman is something that defieth understanding.” ~ Corey Ford
- “My heart spasmed among the peonies like a trout.” ~ E. Lockhart
- “It is utterly soothing to fly fish for trout. All other considerations or worries drift away and you couldn’t keep them close if you wanted. Perhaps it’s standing thigh deep in a river with the water passing at the exact but varying speed of life. You easily recognize this mortality and it dissipates into the landscape.” ~ Jim Harrison
- “It’s a grand thing to be able to take your money in your hand and to think no more of it when it slips away from you than you would a trout that would slip back into the stream.” ~ Lady Gregory
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“See how he throws his baited lines about,/And plays his men as anglers play their trout.” ~ Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.
- “Floating upward through a confusion of dreams and memory, curving like a trout through the rings of previous risings, I surface. My eyes open. I am awake.” ~ Wallace Stegner
- “There is an immense trout in Loch Awe in Scotland, which is so voracious, and swallows his own species with such avidity, that he has obtained the name ‘Salmo Ferox’. I pull about this unnatural monster till he is tired, land him, and administer the coup de grace. Is this cruel? Cruelty should be made of sterner stuff.” ~ Arnold Gingrich
