 
|
You cannot prevent the birds of sorrow from flying over your head, but you can prevent them from building nests in your hair.
Also seen as: You cannot prevent the birds of worry and care from flying over your head. But you can stop them from building a nest in your head.
-Chinese Proverb
|
|
|
|
People live like birds in the woods: When the time comes, each must take flight.
-Chinese Proverb
|
|
|
|
It is not only fine feathers that make fine birds.
-Aesop
The Jay and the Peacock Fables
|
|
|
|
What is more cheerful, now, in the fall of the year, than an open-wood-fire? Do you hear those little chirps and twitters coming out of that piece of apple-wood? Those are the ghosts of the robins and blue-birds that sang upon the bough when it was in blossom last Spring. In Summer whole flocks of them come fluttering about the fruit-trees under the window: so I have singing birds all the year round.
-Thomas Bailey Aldrich
Miss Mehitabel
|
|
|
|
The birds are moulting. If only man could moult also -- his mind once a year its errors, his heart once a year its useless passions.
-James Allen
A Kentucky Cardinal
|
|
|
|
The moment a little boy is concerned with which is a jay and which is a sparrow, he can no longer see the birds or hear them sing.
-Eric Berne
|
|
|
|
When thou seest an eagle, thou seest a portion of genius; lift up thy head!
-William Blake
|
|
|
|
The very idea of a bird is a symbol and a suggestion to the poet. A bird seems to be at the top of the scale, so vehement and intense his life. . . . The beautiful vagabonds, endowed with every grace, masters of all climes, and knowing no bounds -- how many human aspirations are realised in their free, holiday-lives -- and how many suggestions to the poet in their flight and song!
-John Burroughs
|
|
|
|
A turkey is more occult and awful than all the angels and archangels. In so far as God has partly revealed to us an angelic world, he has partly told us what an angel means. But God has never told us what a turkey means. And if you go and stare at a live turkey for an hour or two, you will find by the end of it that the enigma has rather increased than diminished.
-G. K. Chesterton
|
|
|
|
I hope you love birds, too. It is economical. It saves going to Heaven.
-Emily Dickinson
Letter in Letters of Emily Dickinson, ed. Mabel Loomis Todd, 1894, 1885
|
|
|
|
Everything perfect in its kind has to transcend its own kind, it must become something different and incomparable. In some notes the nightingale is still a bird; then it rises above its class and seems to suggest to every winged creature what singing is truly like.
-Johann von Goethe
Elective Affinities, bk. 2, ch. 9, from Ottilie
|
|
|
|
A late lark twitters from the quiet skies:
And from the west,
Where the sun, his day's work ended,
Lingers as in content,
There falls on the old, gray city
An influence luminous and serene,
A shining peace.
-William Ernest Henley
|
|
|
|
O fret not after knowledge -- I have none, and yet my song comes native with the warmth. O fret not after knowledge -- I have none, and yet the Evening listens.
-John Keats
|
|
|
|
Birds sing after a storm; why shouldn't people feel as free to delight in whatever remains to them?
-Rose Kennedy
|
|
|
|
The bird let loose in Eastern skies,
Returning fondly home,
Ne'er stoops to earth her wing, nor flies
Where idle warblers roam;
But high she shoots through air and light,
Above all low delay,
Where nothing earthly bounds her flight,
Nor shadow dims her way.
-Thomas Moore
Oh That I had Wings
|
|
|
|
Inventive man has invented nothing -- nothing from scratch. If he has produced a machine that in motion overcomes the law of gravity, he learned the essentials from the observation of birds.
-Dorothy Thompson
The Courage To Be Happy, 1957
|
|
|
|
One little bird not larger than a sparrow, it may have been a Phalarope, would alight on the turbulent surface where the breakers were five or six feet high, and float buoyantly there like a duck, cunningly taking to its wings and lifting itself a few feet through the air over the foaming crest of each breaker, but sometimes outriding safely a considerable billow which hid it some seconds, when its instinct told it that it would not break. It was a little creature thus to sport with the ocean, but it was as perfect a success in its way as the breakers in theirs.
-Henry David Thoreau
The Beach Again
|
|
|
|
She was not quite what you would call refined. She was not quite what you would call unrefined. She was the kind of person that keeps a parrot.
-Mark Twain
|
|
|
|
To a man, ornithologists are tall, slender, and bearded so that they can stand motionless for hours, imitating kindly trees, as they watch for birds.
-Gore Vidal
|
|
|
|
Did St Francis preach to the birds? Whatever for? If he really liked birds he would have done better to preach to the cats.
-Rebecca West
This Real Night
|
|
|
|
Happier of happy though I be, like them I cannot take possession of the sky, mount with a thoughtless impulse, and wheel there, one of a mighty multitude whose way and motion is a harmony and dance magnificent.
-William Wordsworth
|
|
Books about Birds
