Bird Quotes - Page 24

• If standing for liberty and the Constitution makes you a Wacko Bird, then count me a proud Wacko Bird.

  Ted Cruz

  Liberty, Proud, Constitution

  "Ted Cruz Rocks CPAC: Constitutional Expert with Conservative Passion" by Ken Klukowski, www.breitbart.com. March 18, 2013.

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• Birds are an ecological litmus paper.

  Roger Tory Peterson

  Paper, Ecological

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• Then the Parson might preach, & drink, & sing, And we'd be as happy as birds in the spring; And modest dame Lurch, who is always at Church, Would not have bandy children, nor fasting, nor birch.

  William Blake

  Children, Spring, Atheism

  'Songs of Experience' (1794) 'The Little Vagabond'

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• Bird taxonomy is a difficult field because of the severe anatomical constraints imposed by flight. There are only so many ways to design a bird capable, say, of catching insects in mid-air, with the result that birds of similar habitats tend to have very similar anatomies, whatever their ancestry. For example, American vultures look and behave much like Old World vultures, but biologists have come to realize that the former are related to storks, the latter to hawks, and that their resemblances result from their common lifestyle.

  Jared Diamond

  Air, Design, World

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• When I was young I was on punishment a lot and I used to watch a lot of TV, and I asked myself a question: 'How come people like Mike? How come they like Magic? How come they like Bird? How come they don't like the big guys?' So I just throw a little bit of what they were doing. You smile, you act crazy and silly. And I think people like me because I'm different. I've always been a class clown type of guy. It comes natural.

  Shaquille O'Neal

  Basketball, Crazy, Silly

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• .. to a poet, the human community is like the community of birds to a bird, singing to each other. Love is one of the reasons we are singing to one another, love of language itself, love of sound, love of singing itself, and love of the other birds.

  Sharon Olds

  Love Is, Community, Self Love

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• We are the bird's eggs. Bird's eggs, flowers, butterflies, rabbits, cows, sheep, we are caterpillars; we are leaves of ivy and springs of wildflower. We are women. We rise from the wave. We are gazelle and doe, elephant and whale, lilies and roses and peach, we are air, we are flame, we are oyster and pearl, we are girls. We are woman and nature. And he says he cannot hear us speak. But we hear.

  Susan Griffin

  Girl, Spring, Flower

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• Phoenix, n.
  The classical prototype of the modern 'small hot bird.'

  Ambrose Bierce

  Phoenix, Hot, Modern

  Ambrose Bierce (2001). “The Unabridged Devil's Dictionary”, p.181, University of Georgia Press

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• Things change when you learn to loosen your grip. I think one way and the future is desperate. I think another way everything is in sight. Trees bend so branches don't have to break. We mend the wounds of our last mistake... I live one way holding onto the fence post. I live another way sliding off into space. Each life is loosely assembled... Birds swim, fish do fly. Proud man begins to cry. Birds swim, fish do fly. Things change, so why can't I?

  Tim Finn

  Mistake, Men, Thinking

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• Twentieth pupil of the centuries knows its stuff and bird-changed this century like Jesus climbs the sky.

  Guillaume Apollinaire

  Jesus, Sky, Stuff

  Guillaume Apollinaire (2011). “Alcools: Poems”, p.5, Wesleyan University Press

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• Everything - a bird, a tree, even a simple stone, and certainly a human being - is ultimately unknowable. This is because it has unfathomable depth. All we can perceive, experience, think about, is the surface layer of reality, less than the tip of an iceberg. Underneath the surface appearance, everything is not only connected with everything else, but also with the Source of all life out of which it came. Even a stone, and more easily a flower or a bird, could show you the way back to God, to the Source, to yourself.

  Eckhart Tolle

  Flower, Simple, Reality

  Eckhart Tolle (2006). “A New Earth (Oprah #61): Awakening to Your Life's Purpose”, p.30, Penguin

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• A gourmet can tell from the flavor whether a woodcock's leg is the one on which the bird is accustomed to roost.

  Lucius Beebe

  Gourmet, Flavor, Legs

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• While still in the cage of your being behold the spirit bird before it flies away.

  Rumi

  Cages, Spirit, Fly Away

  Rumi (2012). “Rumi's Little Book of Life: The Garden of the Soul, the Heart, and the Spirit”, p.214, Hampton Roads Publishing

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• Trust me, there are as many ways of living as there are men, and one is no more fit to lead another, than a bird to lead a fish, or a fish a quadruped.

  Frances Wright

  Leadership, Men, Way

  Frances Wright (1831). “A Few Days in Athens: Being the Translation of a Greek Manuscript Discovered in Herculaneum”, p.112

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• My soul was always so full of aspirations, that a God was a necessity to me. I was like a bird with an instinct of migration upon me, and a country to migrate to was as essential as it is to the bird

  Hannah Whitall Smith

  Country, Soul, Essentials

  Hannah Whitall Smith (1949). “A religious rebel: the letters of "H. W. S." (Mrs. Pearsall Smith)”

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• Flowers belong to Fairyland: the flowers and the birds and the butterflies are all that the world has kept of its golden age--the only perfectly beautiful things on earth--joyous, innocent, half divine--useless, say they who are wiser than God.

  Ouida

  Beautiful, Flower, Butterfly

  Ouida (2016). “Bébée, or Two Little Wooden Shoes”, p.48, Ouida

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• Coerced innocence is like an imprisoned lark,--open the door, and it is off forever. The bird that roams through the sky and the groves unrestrained knows how to dodge the hawk and protect itself; but the caged one, the moment it leaves its bars and bolts behind, is pounced upon by the fowler or the vulture.

  Thomas Chandler Haliburton

  Doors, Sky, Forever

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• To wade in marshes and sea margins is the destiny of certain bird, and they are so accurately made for this that they are imprisoned in those places. Each animal out of its habitat would starve. To the physician, each man, each woman, is an amplification of one organ. A soldier, a locksmith, a bank-clerk, and a dancer could not exchange functions. And thus we are victims of adaptation.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Animal, Destiny, Men

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (195?). “The works of Ralph Waldo Emerson in one volume: including the poems, philosophic and inspirational essays, and biographical studies”

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• Was never secret history but birds tell it in the bowers.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Secret

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (1847). “Poems”, p.179

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• Still I sojourn here, alone and palely loitering, though the sedge is withered from the lake and no birds sing. For I sent the bath towel to the wash this morning, and omitted to put out another. I have no towel.

  Rose Macaulay

  Morning, Lakes, Towels

  Rose Macaulay (2011). “Personal Pleasures”, p.102, A&C Black

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• Showers and sunshine bring,
  Slowly, the deepening verdure o'er the earth;
  To put their foliage out, the woods are slack,
  And one by one the singing-birds come back.

  William C. Bryant

  Spring, Sunshine, Singing

  William Cullen Bryant, “Spring In Town”

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• Man is the plumeless genus of bipeds, birds are the plumed.

  Plato

  Men

  Socrates, Plato, Aristotle (1967). “Wit and Wisdom of Socrates, Plato, Aristotle: Being a Treasury of Thousands of Glorious, Inspiring and Imperishable Thoughts, Views and Observations of the Three Great Greek Philosophers, Classified Under about Four Hundred Subjects for Comparative Study”

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• Fish gotta swim, birds gotta fly, writers will go to stupefying lengths to get the infernal roar of words out of their skulls and onto paper.

  Barbara Kingsolver

  Skulls, Swim, Paper

  Barbara Kingsolver (2011). “Small Wonder”, p.47, Faber & Faber

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• A bird sings, a child prattles, but it is the same hymn; hymn indistinct, inarticulate, but full of profound meaning.

  Victor Hugo

  Children, Hymns, Profound

  Victor Hugo, Frank Lee Benedict (1874). “Ninety-three”, p.238, Dawson Bros.

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• Don Quixote thought he could have made beautiful bird-cages and toothpicks if his brain had not been so full of ideas of chivalry. Most people would succeed in small things if they were not troubled with great ambitions.

  Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

  Beautiful, Ambition, Ideas

  Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, J. D. McClatchy (2000). “Poems and Other Writings”, p.796, Library of America

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