Quotations about Birds

Picture of a humming bird

I value my garden more for being full of blackbirds than of cherries, and very frankly give them fruit for their songs. ~Joseph Addison, The Spectator, 1712


I once had a sparrow alight upon my shoulder for a moment, while I was hoeing in a village garden, and I felt that I was more distinguished by that circumstance that I should have been by any epaulet I could have worn. ~Henry David Thoreau


Those little nimble musicians of the air, that warble forth their curious ditties, with which nature hath furnished them to the shame of art. ~Izaak Walton


Have you ever observed a humming-bird moving about in an aerial dance among the flowers - a living prismatic gem.... it is a creature of such fairy-like loveliness as to mock all description. ~W.H. Hudson, Green Mansions


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


God gives every bird its food, but He does not throw it into its nest. ~J.G. Holland


Seagulls... slim yachts of the element. ~Robinson Jeffers


One must ask children and birds how cherries and strawberries taste. ~Johann Wolfgang von Goethe


Half the modern drugs could well be thrown out the window, except that the birds might eat them. ~Martin H. Fischer


The early bird gets the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese. ~Author Unknown


God loved the birds and invented trees. Man loved the birds and invented cages. ~Jacques Deval, Afin de vivre bel et bien


Use the talents you possess - for the woods would be a very silent place if no birds sang except for the best. ~Henry Van Dyke


He clasps the crag with crooked hands;
Close to the sun in lonely lands,
Ringed with the azure world, he stands.
The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls;
He watches from his mountain walls,
And like a thunderbolt he falls.
~Alfred, Lord Tennyson, "The Eagle"


There is nothing in which the birds differ more from man than the way in which they can build and yet leave a landscape as it was before. ~Robert Lynd, The Blue Lion and Other Essays


A Robin Redbreast in a cage
Puts all Heaven in a Rage.
~William Blake, Auguries of Innocence

"Hear! hear!" screamed the jay from a neighboring tree, where I had heard a tittering for some time, "winter has a concentrated and nutty kernel, if you know where to look for it." ~Henry David Thoreau, 28 November 1858 journal entry

When nature made the blue-bird she wished to propitiate both the sky and the earth, so she gave him the color of the one on his back and the hue of the other on his breast. ~John Burroughs


A wonderful bird is the pelican
His bill will hold more than his belican.
He can take in his beak
Food enough for a week,
But I'm damned if I see how the helican.
~Dixon Lanier Merritt


There are joys which long to be ours. God sends ten thousands truths, which come about us like birds seeking inlet; but we are shut up to them, and so they bring us nothing, but sit and sing awhile upon the roof, and then fly away. ~Henry Ward Beecher


Birds sing after a storm; why shouldn't people feel as free to delight in whatever remains to them? ~Rose F. Kennedy


A bird does not sing because it has an answer. It sings because it has a song. ~Chinese Proverb