Words can never fully express the emotions of hunting and fishing, but these eloquent quotes from sporting writers come close.

As one of the quotes below so eloquently puts it, explaining the importance of hunting and fishing can be difficult because it means something different to every individual. Each new trip brings a new memory with it, but what did the hunter next to you in the blind or down the road in his stand take away from the day?

We’re not just a forest of cookie-cutter, camo-clad people standing shoulder to shoulder. We’re distinct trees, each seeing a different piece of the hunting whole. These quotes represent the shared uniqueness that hunting and fishing produces in every sportsman.

 

“When you hunt and fish you collect times, places and minor events that last a lifetime and the fellow beside you collects his own, which may be completely different.”

— Charles F. Waterman, Times and Places, Home and Away, 1988

 

“A sportsman … is a gentleman first. But a sportsman, basically, is a man who kills what he needs, whether it’s a fish or a bird or an animal, or what he wants for a special reason, but he never kills anything just to kill it. And he tries to preserve the very same thing that he kills a little bit from time to time.”

— Robert Ruark, The Old Man and the Boy, 1957

 

A grown man walking in the rain with a sodden bird dog at his heel who can smile at you and say with the kind of conviction that brings the warmth out in the open, “I’d rather be here, doing this, right now, than anything else in the world,” is the man who has discovered that the wealth of the world is not something that is merely bought and sold.”

— Gene Hill, A Hunter’s Fireside Book, 1972

 

“The real hunter is probably as free as it’s possible for modern man to be in this teeming technocracy of ours. Not because he sheds civilized codes and restraints when he goes into the woods, becoming an animal, but because he can project himself out of and beyond himself and be wholly absorbed in a quieter, deeper and older world.”

— John Madson, Out Home, 1979

 

“The best thing about hunting and fishing is that you don’t have to actually do it to enjoy it. You can go to bed every night thinking how much fun you had twenty years ago, and it all comes back as clear as moonlight.”

— Robert Ruark, The Old Man and the Boy, 1957

 

“Men may be raised differently, under different philosophies, with different needs and values. But hunting and fishing are only less universal than hunger and love and death.”

— Russell Chatham, Dark Waters, 1991

 

“It is one of the blessings of wilderness life that it shows us how few things we need in order to be happy.”

— Horace Kephart, Camping and Woodcraft, 1916

 

“It is my fixed conviction that if a parent can give his children a passionate and wholesome devotion to the outdoors, the fact that he cannot leave each of them a fortune does not really matter so much.”

— Archibald Rutledge, An American Hunter, 1937

 

“It has always been my belief that one of the things that makes hunting and fishing so special is that on any given day things can happen to you that you will remember for the rest of your days. Very few things in everyday life are like that.”

— Lamar Underwood, The Greatest Hunting Stories Ever Told, 2000

 

“If someone who has never owned a gun or rod should ask me what I have gotten out of nearly fifty years of fishing and hunting, the very nature of the question would prompt me to say, “Nothing.” It would be practically impossible to explain to such a person what the practice of these sports in boyhood means to a man in later life. He never could even guess that sitting by a pond, waiting for a bite, or watching a woodchuck hole could lay the foundation for patience and perseverance; that a full creel or the legal limit of birds developed restraint, nor would he see that endless miles in pure air and bright sunshine meant health and strength for a better manhood.”

— Austin D. Haight, The Biography or a Sportsman, 1939