Popular quotes about Birds! Wisdom and inspiration are here! | page 49
If they embark on this course the difference between the old and the new education will be an important one. Where the old initiated, the new merely 'conditions'. The old dealt with its pupils as grown birds deal with young birds when they teach them to fly; the new deals with them more as the poultry-keeper deals with young birds- making them thus or thus for purposes of which the birds know nothing. In a word, the old was a kind of propagation-men transmitting manhood to men; the new is merely propaganda.
C. S. LewisI always loved fish for the colors and birds for the plumage. In the same way, I loved those women of the cabaret. They were birds of paradise.
Christian LouboutinThe Admiral says that he never beheld so fair a thing: trees all along the river, beautiful and green, and different from ours, with flowers and fruits each according to their kind, many birds and little birds which sing very sweetly.
Christopher ColumbusIt has been argued that dinosaurs did not die out, but just evolved wings and flew away. At a certain level, this reasoning is sound.... Birds, as a group, did descend from dinosaurs and ... all 8,600 species of birds living today carry some inheritance from their reptilian ancestors.
David M. RaupRead him slowly, dear girl, you must read Kipling slowly. Watch carefully where the commas fall so you can discover the natural pauses. He is a writer who used pen and ink. He looked up from the page a lot, I believe, stared through his window and listened to birds, as most writers who are alone do. Some do not know the names of birds, though he did. Your eye is too quick and North American. Think about the speed of his pen. What an appalling, barnacled old first paragraph it is otherwise.
Michael OndaatjeAs for fowling, during the last years that I carried a gun my excuse was that I was studying ornithology, and sought only new or rare birds. But I confess that I am now inclined to think that there is a finer way of studying ornithology than this. It requires so much closer attention to the habits of the birds, that, if for that reason only, I have been willing to omit the gun.
Henry David ThoreauIt's how you tell the story that makes it new. That's what artists do. They let us look at the world from a different perspective. They let us look at birds in a way that makes us never see birds again in the same way. That's why I don't think computers are healthy for kids. They're too literal. You pop a button and a bluebird comes out. You pop another button and you can take the color blue and shove it into the outline of the bluebird.
Julie TaymorTo the birds you gave songs, the birds gave you songs in return. You gave me only a voice, yet asked for more, thus I sing.
Rabindranath TagoreI continue to handpick the beetles, mosquitoes feast on me, birds eat the mosquitoes, something else eats the birds, and so on up and down the biotic pyramid.
William F. LonggoodAll the birds love Touche Eclat. It's a (concealer) pen that gets rid of eye bags. But I'm quite happy otherwise. I train a lot.
Jason FlemyngWhy who makes much of a miracle? As to me I know nothing else but miracles, whether they be animals feeding in the fields, Or, birds, or the wonderfulness of insects in the air, Or the wonderfulness of the sundown, or of stars shining so quiet and bright, Or the exquisite delicate thin curve of the new moon in spring; These, with the rest, one and all, are to me, miracles.
Walt WhitmanThe ones I loved fly as birds in the open sky above me. Soaring, weaving, calling to me to join them. I want so badly to follow them, but the seawater saturates my wings, making it impossible to lift them. The ones I hated have taken to the water, horrible scaled things that tear my salty flesh with needle teeth. Biting again and again. Dragging me beneath the surface.
Suzanne CollinsFrom that time forth he believed that the wise man is one who never sets himself apart from other living things, whether they have speech or not, and in later years he strove long to learn what can be learned, in silence, from the eyes of animals, the flight of birds, the great slow gestures of trees.
Ursula K. Le GuinMy days were not days of the week, bearing the stamp of any heathen deity, nor were they minced into hours and fretted by the ticking of a clock; for I lived like the Puri Indians, of whom it is said that "for yesterday, today, and tomorrow they have only one word, and they express the variety of meaning by pointing backward for yesterday forward for tomorrow, and overhead for the passing day." This was sheer idleness to my fellow-townsmen, no doubt; but if the birds and flowers had tried me by their standard, I should not have been found wanting.
Henry David ThoreauIn town and in country there must be landscapes where we can walk in safety, pick fruit, cycle, work, sleep, swim, listen to the birds, bask in the sun, run through the trees and laze beside cool waters.
Tom TurnerI got a job as a dishwasher in Oakland, and I would draw all day. It was nice because the lady who ran the boardinghouse where I worked let me live there for nothing if I gave her some drawings every week - mostly park drawings of birds and such.
Claes OldenburgThe birds and I share a natural history. It is a matter of rootedness, of living inside a place for so long that the mind and imagination fuse.
Terry Tempest WilliamsI have read somewhere that in the Emperor's palace at Byzantium was a tree made of gold and silver, and artificial birds that sang.
William Butler YeatsA fine morning's killing, ay! All their necks wrung - all dead birds! Once they could fly - fly and swim! Fly and swim! All dead now - and sold cheap in the open market!
Marie CorelliZen enriches no one. There is no body to be found. The birds may come and circle for a while in the place where it is thought to be. But they soon go elsewhere. When they are gone, the "nothing," the "no-body" that was there, suddenly appears. That is Zen. It was there all the time but the scavengers missed it, because it was not their kind of prey.
Thomas MertonI liked the solitude and the silence of the woods and the hills. I felt there the sense of a presence, something undefined and mysterious, which was reflected in the faces of the flowers and the movements of birds and animals, in the sunlight falling through the leaves and in the sound of running water, in the wind blowing on the hills and the wide expanse of earth and sky.
Bede GriffithsA bibliophile of little means is likely to suffer often. Books don't slip from his hands but fly past him through the air, high as birds, high as prices.
William Lyon PhelpsPeople just weren't interesting. Maybe they weren't supposed to be. But animals, birds, even insects were. I couldn't understand it.
Charles BukowskiA bird maintains itself in the air by imperceptible balancing, when near to the mountains or lofty ocean crags; it does this by means of the curves of the winds which as they strike against these projections, being forced to preserve their first impetus bend their straight course towards the sky with divers revolutions, at the beginning of which the birds come to a stop with their wings open, receiving underneath themselves the continual buffetings of the reflex courses of the winds.
Leonardo da VinciA tree is made to live in peace in the color of day and in friendship with the sun, the wind and the rain. Its roots plunge in thefat fermentation of the soil, sucking in its elemental humors, its fortifying juices. Trees always seem lost in a great tranquil dream. The dark rising sap makes them groan in the warm afternoons. A tree is a living being that knows the course of the clouds and presses the storms because it is full of birds' nests.
Jacques RoumainI see my way as birds their trackless way. I shall arrive,- what time, what circuit first, I ask not; but unless God send his hail Or blinding fire-balls, sleet or stifling snow, In some time, his good time, I shall arrive: He guides me and the bird. In his good time.
Robert BrowningMe and a mate picked up two darling birds and they took us back to their flat. I went into the bedroom with my bird and she started getting undressed. I was that drunk I was standing there wondering how to get undressed without letting go of the award. I went to sit on the bed, missed it by four feet and ended up lying on the floor. I remember the bird looking down at me, and saying, โSome player of the year.โ Then I fell asleep. I woke up still clutching my award and staggered out of the flat. I hadnโt a bloody clue where I was.
George BestEric Peters is a chronicler of his journey; he's been a faithful steward of the story God is telling through him, and this newest chapter, BiRDS OF RELOCATiON, is Eric's testimony that along the way there are moments of deep joy and gratitude-they may seem brief, but they're bright, and they're worth singing about. The joy I hear on this record heralds a long and welcome peace.
Andrew PetersonNo shade, no shine, no butterflies, no bees, No fruits, no flowers, no leaves, no birds - November!
Thomas HoodMay my heart always be open to little birds, who are the secrets of living. Whatever they sing is better than to know. And if men should not hear them - then men are old.
e. e. cummingsThe deep parts of my life pour onward, as if the river shores were opening out. I feel closer to what language can't reach. With my senses, as with birds, I climb into the windy heaven... in the ponds broken off from the sky. . .
Rainer Maria RilkeI drive a V10 Ford Excursion and I have to tell folks all the time: look I've got five kids and a dog and birds. I would have to have two Lincolns with two V8s, you see, so it would be 16 cylinders.
Dan AykroydGive food to the birds, you will then be surrounded by the wings of love, you will be encompassed by the joys of little silent hearts!
Mehmet Murat IldanWe heard no other sounds. We met no other people. We saw only two bright red birds leap startled from the center of the meadow and dart into the woods.
Haruki MurakamiHe imagines Owens' body dotted with saltwater reservoirs just below the skin. An entire wetland, populated with tiny fish and birds, thriving in his agitation. A species of dwarf crocodile lazing beside an artery.
Lisa LingGo to bed when summers ends, what a good idea; wake up bright and early when birds announce its spring.
Francis Norris, 1st Earl of BerkshireNow for a good twelve-hour sleep, I told myself. Twelve solid hours. Let birds sing, let people go to work. Somewhere out there, a volcano might blow, Israeli commandos might decimate a Palestinian village. I couldn't stop it. I was going to sleep.
Haruki MurakamiSome 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 KingSeriously, many people have told me they can't eat turkeys anymore after getting to know them. I think in the wider world, when the stories air on the media, they help banish the idea that birds, other than parrots, are somehow lesser.
Karen DawnWhat is it with you today?โ says Christina on the way to breakfast. Her eyes are still swollen from sleep and her tangled hair forms a fuzzy halo around her face. โOh, you know,โ I say. โSun shining. Birds chirping.โ She raises an eyebrow at me, as if reminding me that we are in an underground tunnel.
Veronica Roth