Bird Song Quotes

• You must hear the birds song without attempting to render it into nouns and verbs.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Song, Bird, Verbs

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (2015). “Ralph Waldo Emerson”, p.794, Harvard University Press

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• I think my great book is Born to Sing: An Interpretation and World Survey of Bird Song.

  Charles Hartshorne

  Song, Book, Thinking

  "Not The Average Philosopher". Harvard Magazine, Volume 99, Number 5, May/June 1997.

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• You only need to walk in mindfulness, making peaceful, happy steps on our planet. Breathe deeply, and enjoy your breathing. Be aware that the sky is blue and the birds' songs are beautiful. Enjoy being alive and you will help the living Christ and the living Buddha continue for a long, long time.

  Nhat Hanh

  Happy, Beautiful, Song

  Thich Nhat Hanh (2007). “Living Buddha, Living Christ 10th Anniversary Edition”, p.59, Penguin

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• I value my garden more for being full of blackbirds than of cherries, and very frankly give them fruit for their songs.

  Joseph Addison

  Song, Animal, Garden

  Joseph Addison, Sir Richard Steel (1810). “The Spectator”, p.20

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• Some birds are not meant to be caged, that's all. Their feathers are too bright, their songs too sweet and wild. So you let them go, or when you open the cage to feed them they somehow fly out past you. And the part of you that knows it was wrong to imprison them in the first place rejoices, but still, the place where you live is that much more drab and empty for their departure.

  Stephen King

  Friendship, Letting Go, Song

  FaceBook post by Stephen King from Jan 08, 2014

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• 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

  Beautiful, Song, Nature

  John Burroughs (1904). “The Writings of John Burroughs: Birds and poets, with other papers”

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• The sun shines not on us but in us. The rivers flow not past, but through us. Thrilling, tingling, vibrating every fiber and cell of the substance of our bodies, making them glide and sing. The trees wave and the flowers bloom in our bodies as well as our souls, and every bird song, wind song, and tremendous storm song of the rocks in the heart of the mountains is our song, our very own, and sings our love.

  John Muir

  Song, Flower, Heart

  John Muir, Linnie Marsh Wolfe (1979). “John of the Mountains: The Unpublished Journals of John Muir”, p.92, Univ of Wisconsin Press

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• People listen to music with cavemen ears: Is it a bird song or the call of a lion? The audience at a musical is dancing in their hearts.

  Marsha Norman

  Song, Heart, People

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• Over the whole earth- this infinitely small globe that possesses all we know of sunshine and bird song- an unfamiliar blight is creeping: man- man, who has become at last a planetary disease and who would, if his technology yet permitted, pass this infection to another star.

  Loren Eiseley

  Song, Stars, Sunshine

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• A delicate fabric of bird song
  Floats in the air,
  The smell of wet wild earth
  Is everywhere.
  Oh I must pass nothing by
  Without loving it much,
  The raindrop try with my lips,
  The grass with my touch;
  For how can I be sure
  I shall see again
  The world on the first of May
  Shining after the rain?

  Sara Teasdale

  Song, Spring, Rain

  Sara Teasdale, William Drake (1984). “Mirror of the Heart: Poems of Sara Teasdale”, MacMillan Publishing Company

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• Right now the day length is exactly the same as in spring when birds key into it and begin singing. The birds are a little confused by it all and the singing isn't very intense. It only lasts a week or so each fall, but it's still cool to hear spring bird songs at this time of the year.

  Craig Thompson

  Song, Confused, Spring

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• A great many people (not you) do now seem to think that the mere state of being worried is in itself meritorious. I don’t think it is. We must, if it so happens, give our lives for others: but even while we’re doing it, I think we’re meant to enjoy Our Lord and, in Him, our friends, our food, our sleep, our jokes, and the birds’ song and the frosty sunrise.

  C. S. Lewis

  Song, Sleep, Thinking

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• A gush of bird song, a patter of dew
  A cloud and a rainbow's warning;
  Suddenly sunshine and perfect blue
  An April day in the morning!

  Harriet Elizabeth Prescott Spofford

  Song, Morning, Spring

  Harriet Elizabeth Prescott Spofford (1882). “Poems”

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• And now everything has changed once again. The air of the Close each evening is full of bird song - I've never really noticed it before. Full of birdsong and summer perfumes, full of strange glimpses and intimations just out of the corner of my eye, of longings and sadness and undefined hopes.It has a name, this sweet disturbance. Its name is Lamorna.

  Michael Frayn

  Summer, Song, Sweet

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• My faith is the grand drama of my life. I'm a believer, so I sing words of God to those who have no faith.
  I give bird songs to those who dwell in cities and have never heard them, make rhythms for those who know only military marches or jazz, and paint colors for those who see none.

  Olivier Messiaen

  Life, Music, God

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• I will make you brooches and toys for your delight Of bird-song at morning and star-shine at night. I will make a palace fit for you and me Of green days in forests and blue days at sea.

  Robert Louis Stevenson

  Song, Morning, Stars

  'Songs of Travel' (1896) 'I will make you brooches and toys for your delight'

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• Winter has caused damage everywhere: meadow and forest are all grey, where before you heard many sounds. If I could see the girls play ball on the street, then bird song would come back. If only I could sleep through the winter! When I am awake I feel only hatred that his power is so far and wide. God knows, he even fights with May; I picked flowers where there is now snow.

  Walther von der Vogelweide

  Girl, Song, Flower

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• Cobbled streets and no shops open past six o'clock, a communal life that seemed to revolve around church, and where you could often hear bird song and nothing else: Gaia felt as though she had fallen through a portal into a land lost in time.

  J. K. Rowling

  Song, Past, Land

  J.K. Rowling (2012). “The Casual Vacancy”, p.187, Hachette UK

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• To rise above treeline is to go above thought, and after, the descent back into bird song, bog orchids, willows, and firs is to sink into the preliterate parts of ourselves.

  Gretel Ehrlich

  Song, Nature, Orchids

  Gretel Ehrlich (1992). “Islands, the universe, home”, Penguin Group USA

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• Girl with the burning golden eyes,
  And red-bird song, and snowy throat:
  I bring you gold and silver moons,
  And diamond stars, and mists that float.
  I bring you moons and snowy clouds,
  I bring you prarie skies to-night
  To feebly praise your golden eyes
  And red-bird song, and throat so white.
  ~Vachel Lindsay "To Gloriana"
  God wrote His loveliest poem on the day
  He made the first silver poplar tree,
  And set it high upon a pale-gold hill
  For all the new enchanted earth to see.

  Grace Noll Crowell

  Girl, Song, Stars

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• Over increasingly large areas of the United States, spring now comes unheralded by the return of the birds, and the early mornings are strangely silent where once they were filled with the beauty of bird song.

  Rachel Carson

  Beauty, Song, Morning

  Silent Spring ch. 8 (1962)

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• As one sits here in summertime and listens to the cuckoo and all the other bird songs, the crackling and buzzing of insects, as one gazes at the shining colors of flowers, doth one become dumbstruck before the Kingdom of the Creator.

  Carl Linnaeus

  Song, Flower, Color

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• Man has gone to the moon but he does not yet know how to make a flame tree or a bird song. Let us keep our dear countries free from irreversible mistakes which would lead us in the future to long for those same birds and trees.

  Felix Houphouet-Boigny

  Country, Song, Mistake

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