Quotes about fisherman

A collection of quotes on the topic of fisherman, fish, fishing, time.

Quotes about fisherman

“I have a habit to be reborn as a writer. So if I find myself in a crisis that I have never experienced, I can be born, or I can write something, by the power of the habit. Even a soldier or a farmer or a fisherman can be reborn by the power of the habit when he meets the greatest crisis of his life.”

Kenzaburō Ōe (1935) Japanese author

Conversations with History interview (1999)

Life

“For as soon as the distribution of labour comes into being, each man has a particular exclusive sphere of activity, which is forced upon him and from which he cannot escape. He is a hunter, a fisherman, a shepherd, or a critical critic and must remain so if he does not wish to lose his means of livelihood; while in communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, to fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner, just as I have in mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, shepherd or critic.”

Karl Marx (1818–1883) German philosopher, economist, sociologist, journalist and revolutionary socialist

Source: The German Ideology (1845-1846), Vol. 1, Part 1.

Fish

“In our own times, you see, an emperor came to the city of Rome, where there’s the temple of an emperor, where there’s a fisherman’s tomb”
Temporibus enim nostris venit imperator in urbem Romam: ibi est templum imperatoris, ibi est sepulcrum piscatoris. Itaque ille ad deprecandam a Domino salutem imperator pius atque christianus non perrexit ad templum imperatoris superbum, sed ad sepulcrum piscatoris, ubi humilis ipsum piscatorem imitaretur, ut tunc respectus aliquid impetraret a Domino, quod superbiens imperator mereri non posset.

Aurelius Augustinus (354–430) early Christian theologian and philosopher

341:4; English from: Newly Discovered Sermons, 1997, Edmund Hill, tr., John E. Rotelle, ed., New City Press, New York, p. p. 286.
Sermons
Context: In our own times, you see, an emperor came to the city of Rome, where there’s the temple of an emperor, where there’s a fisherman’s tomb. And so that pious and Christian emperor, wishing to beg for health, for salvation from the Lord, did not proceed to the temple of a proud emperor, but to the tomb of a fisherman, where he could imitate that fisherman in humility, so that he, being thus approached, might then obtain something from the Lord, which a haughty emperor would be quite unable to earn.

Time

“In our own times, you see, an emperor came to the city of Rome, where there’s the temple of an emperor, where there’s a fisherman’s tomb. And so that pious and Christian emperor, wishing to beg for health, for salvation from the Lord, did not proceed to the temple of a proud emperor, but to the tomb of a fisherman, where he could imitate that fisherman in humility, so that he, being thus approached, might then obtain something from the Lord, which a haughty emperor would be quite unable to earn.”

Aurelius Augustinus (354–430) early Christian theologian and philosopher

Temporibus enim nostris venit imperator in urbem Romam: ibi est templum imperatoris, ibi est sepulcrum piscatoris. Itaque ille ad deprecandam a Domino salutem imperator pius atque christianus non perrexit ad templum imperatoris superbum, sed ad sepulcrum piscatoris, ubi humilis ipsum piscatorem imitaretur, ut tunc respectus aliquid impetraret a Domino, quod superbiens imperator mereri non posset.
341:4; English from: Newly Discovered Sermons, 1997, Edmund Hill, tr., John E. Rotelle, ed., New City Press, New York, ISBN 1565481038 ISBN 9781565481039p. p. 286.
Sermons

Time, Health

“Perhaps I should not have been a fisherman, he thought. But that was the thing that I was born for.”

Ernest Hemingway book The Old Man and the Sea

Source: The Old Man and the Sea

“Come fishing with me, said the fisherman to the worm.”

Bertolt Brecht (1898–1956) German poet, playwright, theatre director

Komm, geh mit angeln, sagte der Fischer zum Wurm.
Mutter Courage to the army recruiter when he tries to recruit her son in Scene 1
Mother Courage and Her Children (1939)

Fish

“In the twelfth century the Basque fisherman of Biarritz used to hunt whales with deadly efficiency. When the whales sensibly moved away, the Basques chased them further and further, with consequence that the fishermen of Biarritz discovered America before Columbus did. (This is a matter for local pride but on a larger view is not quite so stunning, since with the possible exception of the Swiss everybody discovered America before Columbus did).”

Clive James (1939–2019) Australian author, critic, broadcaster, poet, translator and memoirist

'Postcard from Biarritz'
Essays and reviews, Flying Visits (1984)

“This (Taiwanese fisherman shot by Philippines coast guard incident) is not a problem between the people of Taiwan and the people of the Philippines. This is a problem between the people of Taiwan and the Philippine administration.”

Ma Ying-jeou (1950) Taiwanese politician, president of the Republic of China

Ma Ying-jeou (2013) cited in: " Feud not between Filipinos and Taiwanese, says Ma Ying-jeou https://web.archive.org/web/20130523235540/http://www.asianewsnet.net/Feud-not-between-Filipinos-and-Taiwanese-says-Ma-Y-47054.html" in Asia News Network, 23 May 2013. Statement made during the Central Standing Committee of Kuomintang weekly meeting regarding the shooting incident of Taiwanese fisherman by Philippines coast guard at the disputed sea territory in South China Sea, 22 May 2013. Diplomatic issues

People, Problem

“Gamblers wager for the sake of playing. Among those who fish for pleasure, the best fisherman is not the one who catches the most fish but the one who enjoys fishing the most. The point of playing is that the play has no point.”

John Gray book Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals

As It Is: Playing With Fate (p. 196)
Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals (2002)

Pleasure, Fish

“A writer who does not write is nothing. One may as well be a fisherman who doesn't fish, a stripper who doesn't strip, or a beggar who doesn't beg.”

Caitlín R. Kiernan (1964) writer

7 December 2004
Unfit for Mass Consumption (blog entries), 2004

Fish

“There's a city, draped in net
Fisherman net
And in the half light, in the half light
It looks like every tower
Is covered in webs
Moving and glistening and rocking
It's babies in rhythm
As the spider of time is climbing
Over the ruins.”

Kate Bush (1958) British recording artist; singer, songwriter, musician and record producer

Song lyrics, Aerial (2005), A Sea of Honey (Disc 1)

Light, Time, Baby

“The ploughman ploughs, the fisherman dreams of fish;
Aloft, the sailor, through a world of ropes
Guides tangled meditations, feverish
With memories of girls forsaken, hopes
Of brief reunions, new discoveries,
Past rum consumed, rum promised, rum potential.”

Michael Hamburger (1924–2007) British translator, poet, critic, memoirist and academic

Lines On Brueghel's "Icarus" http://www.themediadrome.com/content/poetry/hamburger_lines_on_icarus.htm

World, Dreams, Hope, Girl

“The best thing fishing taught me, I think was how to be alone. Without this ability no writer can really survive or work, and there is a strong relationship between the activity of the fisherman, letting his line down into unknown depths in the hope of catching an unseen prey (which may be worth keeping, or may not) and that of a writer trolling his memory and reflections for unexpected jags and jerks of association.”

Robert Hughes (1938–2012) Australian critic, historian, writer

Things I Didn't Know (2006)

Hope, Jerk, Thinking, Fish

“To gain a better understanding, I'm just trying to make it real/reel. Like a fisherman,
Pon De River fam. I Pon My Bank, deposit my thoughts. Till my mind draws a blank
and I withdraw from checking. I'll leave that with ya'll for a second…”

Lupe Fiasco (1982) rapper

"Run Down"
Mixtapes, Fahrenheit 1/15 Part I: The Truth Is Among Us (2006)

Understanding, Drawing

“I had the opportunity to fish as a kid, I just follow through with it. I'm not the best fisherman in the world, but I have a lot more fun than a lot of my other fishing friends in this world, who think they're supposedly experts. Sometimes the fish cooperate, sometimes they don't.”

John du Pont (1938–2010) American heir to the Du Pont family fortune, ornothologist, conchologist, murderer

1988 interview https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D4WOqUkJmFQ&t=3m Quote

World, Thinking, Fish

“The fisherman fishes as the urchin eats cream buns, from lust.”

T. H. White (1906–1964) author

England Have My Bones (1936)

Fish

“"Our guide, a fisherman. A good fellow." "He doesn't hate us?" "Hate us?" "I keep being told how the Spanish hate us, sir." "He hates the French, like I do, Sharpe. If there is one constancy in this vale of tears, it is always hate the damned French, always."”

Bernard Cornwell (1944) British writer

General Thomas Graham and Captain Richard Sharpe, p. 126
Sharpe (Novel Series), Sharpe's Fury (2006)

Hate, Tear

“At this time, Icelanders were said to be the poorest people in Europe, just as their fathers and grandfathers and great-grandfathers had been, all the way back to the earliest settlers; but they believed that many long centuries ago there had been a Golden Age in Iceland, when Icelanders had not been mere farmers and fisherman as they were now, but royal-born heroes and poets who owned weapons, gold, and ships.”

Halldór Laxness (1902–1998) Icelandic author

Paradísarheimt (Paradise Reclaimed) (1960)

People, Age, Way, Time

“The complete closed world consists of three parts-substratum, phenomenal world, and observer. By our experiments we drag up activities from the substratum into the phenomenal world of space and time, but there is no clear line of demarcation between subject and object, and by performing observations on the world, we alter it, much as a fisherman dragging up fish from the depths of the seas disturbs the waters and also damages the fish.”

James Jeans (1877–1946) British mathematician and astronomer

Physics and Philosophy (1942)

World, Fish, Water, Time

“A movie loosely based upon my novel, I Know What You Did Last Summer, opened in theaters around the country. I was ecstatic until I settled into a theater seat with my box of popcorn and discovered that Hollywood had turned my teenage suspense story into a slasher film. The setting had been changed from the mountains of New Mexico to a fishing village on the East Coast, so an insane fisherman, who wasn't in my book, could decapitate my characters with an ice hook. The first thing I did after leaving the theater was phone our daughter Kerry and warn her not to let the grandchildren see it.”

Lois Duncan (1934–2016) American young-adult and children's writer

On the adaptation of her novel I Know What You Did Last Summer in 1997, quoted in MoviePilot https://moviepilot.com/posts/3514425 piece 1990–2002

Books, Mountain, Fish, Change

“It's like catching a fish, you know what I mean? It's the fish that's beautiful, not the fisherman. And I think whoever hasn't understood that attitude in Queens is not here any more. And if I ever think the fisherman's better than the fish, I hope someone fuckin' fires me too.”

Josh Homme (1973) American musician

" Dazed & Confused Magazine | Josh Homme | Sept'10 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zf8MQqPIroc", Dazed & Confused Magazine (September 2010)

Beauty, Hope, Thinking, Fish

“To the bird watcher, the suburbanite who derives joy from birds in his garden, the hunter, the fisherman or the explorer of wild regions, anything that destroys the wildlife of an area for even a single year has deprived him of pleasure to which he has a legitimate right. This is a valid point of view.”

Rachel Carson book Silent Spring

Source: Silent Spring (1962), p. 52 (Section 7, Needless Havoc)

Pleasure, Bird, Joy

“We marched him to the turfy shack where he lived with his parents and while the youth sulked Petronius Longus put the whole moral issue in succinct terms to them: Ollia’s father was a legionary veteran who had served in Egypt and Syria for over twenty years until he left with double pay, three medals, and a diploma that made Ollia legitimate; he now ran a boxers’ training school where he was famous for his high-minded attitude and his fighters were notorious for their loyalty to him… The old fisherman was a toothless, hapless, faithless cove you would not trust too near you with a filleting knife, but whether from fear or simple cunning he co-operated eagerly. The lad agreed to marry the girl and since Silvia would never abandon Ollia here, we decided that the fisherboy had to come back with us to Rome. His relations looked impressed by this result. We accepted it as the best we could achieve.”

Lindsey Davis book Shadows in Bronze

Shadows in Bronze

Youth, Fear, School, Girl

“On the day the world ends
A bee circles a clover,
A fisherman mends a glimmering net.”

Czeslaw Milosz (1911–2004) Polish, poet, diplomat, prosaist, writer, and translator

"A Song On the End of the World" http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/19195

World, Bee

“Winter Light — suppose we discuss that now?… The film is closely connected with a particular piece of music: Stravinski's A Psalm Symphony. I heard it on the radio one morning during Easter, and it struck me I'd like to make a film about a solitary church on the plains of Uppland. Someone goes into the church, locks himself in, goes up to the altar, and says: 'God, I'm staying here until in one way or another You've proved to me You exist. This is going to be the end either of You or of me!' Originally the film was to have been about the days and nights lived through by this solitary person in the locked church, getting hungrier and hungrier, thirstier and thirstier, more and more expectant, more and more filled with his own experiences, his visions, his dreams, mixing up dream and reality, while he's involved in this strange, shadowy wrestling match with God.
We were staying out on Toro, in the Stockholm archipelago. It was the first summer I'd had the sea all around me. I wandered about on the shore and went indoors and wrote, and went out again. The drama turned into something else; into something altogether tangible, something perfectly real, elementary and self-evident.
The film is based on something I'd actually experienced. Something a clergyman up in Dalarna told me: the story of the suicide, the fisherman Persson. One day the clergyman had tried to talk to him; the next, Persson had hanged himself. For the clergyman it was a personal catastrophe.”

Ingmar Bergman (1918–2007) Swedish filmmaker

Jonas Sima interview 
Bergman on Bergman (1970)

God, Dreams, Music, Way

“He always thought of the sea as la mar, which is what people call her in spanish when they love her. Sometimes those who love her say bad things of her, but they are always said as though she were a woman. Some of the younger fisherman, those who used buoys as floats for their lines or had motorboats bought when the shark lovers had much money, spoke of her as el mar, which is masculine, they spoke of her as a contestant or a place or even an enemy. But the old man always thought of her as feminine, as something that gave or withheld great favors. If she did wild or wicked things, it is because she could not help them. The moon affects her as it does a woman, he thought.”

Ernest Hemingway book The Old Man and the Sea

The Old Man and the Sea (1952)

Love, Money, People, Lovers

“Walking about? With a hole in his forehead full of maggots" "Aye. It were like a damn fisherman's tub.”

Adam Thorpe (1956) British writer

Joseph and Walter
Nineteen Twenty-One (2001)

“Most imprisoned writers have been shut away for their activities as citizens striving for liberation against the oppression of the general society to which they belong. Others have been condemned by repressive regimes for serving society by writing as well as they can; for this aesthetic venture of ours becomes subversive when the shameful secrets of our times are explored deeply, with the artist's rebellious integrity to the state of being manifest in life around her or him; then the writer's themes and characters inevitably are formed by the pressures and distortions of that society as the life of the fisherman is determined by the power of the sea.”

Nadine Gordimer (1923–2014) South african Nobel-winning writer

Writing and Being (1991)

Life, Secret, Time, Sea

“Studying texts and stiff meditation can make you lose your Original Mind.
A solitary tune by a fisherman, though, can be an invaluable treasure.”

Ikkyu (1394–1481) Japanese Buddhist monk

"A Fisherman" in Wild Ways : Zen Poems (2003), edited and translated by John Stevens, p. 37.
Context: Studying texts and stiff meditation can make you lose your Original Mind.
A solitary tune by a fisherman, though, can be an invaluable treasure.
Dusk rain on the river, the moon peeking in and out of the clouds;
Elegant beyond words, he chants his songs night after night.

Study

“A SPRING
Long stalks of rain
are growing from the skies
down towards ash-black soil,
softer than deer hearts
frozen in concentration
at river banks

Everything that is not here
lies beyond these waters – more effusive
than a fisherman’s song,
when come evening time
they sail back to theirs rocky homes
settled at Shannon’s ridges
winding like a maggot in a downpour
and greener still
than eyes of women
that bear the same name”

Marcin Malek (1975) Polish writer

Diary of an unfinished journey (2012), Page 56, verse I-II.

Women, Home, Spring, Water

“I will mitigate the impact of a no-deal Brexit on you and step in to help smooth those short-term difficulties. If we could do it for the bankers in the financial crisis, we can do it for our fisherman, farmers and small businesses now.”

Jeremy Hunt (1966) British politician

Tory leadership: Jeremy Hunt sets 30 September 'no-deal deadline' https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-48819260 BBC News (1 July 2019) 2019

Business, Help

“Wyrd is too vast and too complex, for us to comprehend, for we are ourselves, part of wyrd and cannot stand back to observe it as if it were a separate force. Just as fisherman cannot see the full extent of the seas, so even a sorcerer cannot view the totality of wyrd.”

Brian Bates (1944) British academic

The Way of the Wyrd : Tales of an Anglo-Saxon Sorcerer (1983)

Sea, Parting

Clive James (1939–2019) Australian author, critic, broadcaster, poet, translator and memoirist

This is a matter for local pride but on a larger view is not quite so stunning, since with the possible exception of the Swiss everybody discovered America before Columbus did
'Postcard from Biarritz'
Essays and reviews, Flying Visits (1984)

“In July 1969 I happened to be in Kenya, on the shore of Lake Rudolf, when I heard with incredulity from a naked Turkana fisherman that the 'Wazungu' as he called Europeans, including Americans - had landed on the moon. He had heard the news at a distant mission station. To him this achievement, being incomprehensible, was without significance; it filled me, however, with a sense of desecration, and of despair at the deadly technical ingenuity of modern man. Even as a boy I recognized that motor transport and aeroplanes must increasingly shrink the world and irrevocably destroy its fascinating diversity. My forebodings have been amply fulfilled.”

Wilfred Thesiger (1910–2003) British explorer

Source: The Life Of My Choice (1987), p. 443.

Despair, Boy, Distant, Sense