Fly-fishing may be a very pleasant amusement; but angling or float fishing I can only compare to a stick and a string, with a worm at one end and a fool at the other.
Hope is an amusement rather than a good, and adapted to none but very tranquil minds.
I'm afraid that eating in restaurants reflects one's experiences with movies, art galleries, novels, music - that is, characterized by mild amusement but with an overall feeling of stupidity and shame. Better to cook for yourself.
Our New England climate is mild and equable compared with that of the Platte.
Hunting was the labour of the savages of North America, but the amusement of the gentlemen of England.
My mother said I should have a 'change of scenery.' The word scenery made be think of a play. And as we were driving around, it made sense that way. Because no matter how much the scenery changed, we were still on the same stage.
Shakespeare has been adapted by Akira Kurosawa. 'Dangerous Liaisons' has been adapted into a Chinese movie. 'Blood Simple', the Coen brothers movie, was adapted by Zhang Yimou.
On many accounts, Cornwall may be regarded as one of the most interesting counties of England, whether we regard it for its coast scenery, its products, or its antiquities.
Though no participator in the joy of more vehement sport, I have a pleasure that I cannot reconcile to my abstract notions of the tenderness due to dumb creatures in the tranquil cruelty of angling. I can only palliate the wanton destructiveness of my amusement by trying to assure myself that my pleasure does not spring from the success of the treachery I practise toward a poor little fish, but rather from that innocent revelry in the luxuriance of summer life which only anglers enjoy to the utmost.
We may say of angling, as Dr. Boteler said of strawberries, Doubtless God could have made a better berry, but doubtless God never did; and so, if I might be judge, God never did make a more calm, quiet, innocent recreation than angling.
I would rather write for the instruction, or even the amusement of the poor than for the amusement of the rich.
It matters little whether a man be mathematically or philologically or artistically cultivated, so he be but cultivated.
There's no black and white dividing line between a mild Aspergers, which is the mild autism, and computer engineer, for example.
Somewhere in the wide range of activity between the hard physical effort of wading for long hours against a swift current in a rocky stream, casting steadily, and the indolence of lying quietly in the sun waiting for a bobber to go under there is a type of angling to suit everyone's mood and everyone's pocketbook. Fishing is fishing wherever it is found... Angling's problems are never solved.
Terrestrial scenery is much, but it is not all. Men go in search of it; but the celestial scenery journeys to them; it goes its way round the world. It has no nation, it costs no wearinesss, it knows no bonds.
I have come to see the nonsense of attempting to describe fine scenery. There is no such possibility. If scenery could be adequately reproduced in words, there would have been no need of God's making it in reality.