Life & Wisdom Quote by Izaak Walton

Walton makes leisure sound like a moral decision, not a guilty pleasure. "I have laid aside business" carries the weight of a small renunciation: commerce, obligation, and the city’s anxious tempo are not merely paused; they’re put down, like tools that can start to shape the user. The phrase is almost liturgical in its calm, a deliberate distancing from the Protestant work ethic beginning to harden into cultural law in 17th-century England.

Then comes the sly tonal turn: "gone a'fishing". The apostrophe is doing real work. It’s colloquial, unpretentious, a little pastoral wink that suggests this isn’t aristocratic idleness but a chosen simplicity. Fishing here isn’t sport so much as a discipline of attention: long stretches of waiting, humility before chance, the mind settling into the rhythm of water and weather. Walton’s intent, in The Compleat Angler, is to frame angling as a counter-culture of quietness, a practice that trains patience and gratitude in an age of political turbulence and religious conflict.

The subtext is gently polemical. Walton isn’t attacking "business" head-on; he’s making it look cramped and spiritually noisy by comparison. The line offers a template for resistance that feels almost scandalously mild: step away, go outside, accept slowness. It’s an early argument that a good life might be measured less by output than by the quality of one’s hours - and that the most radical act, sometimes, is to stop hurrying.