Quotes About Birds

A tribute to our fine feathered friends

They’re the staple of a beautiful spring or summer day. They sing to wake us up and command our attention when they follow us overhead. These quotes are about birds, our beautiful feathered friends.

1. “Birds are a miracle because they prove to us there is a finer, simpler state of being which we may strive to attain.” -Doug Coupland

2. “It is not only fine feathers that make fine birds.” -Aesop

3. “The reason birds can fly and we can’t is simply because they have perfect faith, for to have faith is to have wings.” -J.M. Barrie

4. “God loved the birds and invented trees. Man loved the birds and invented cages.” -Jacques Deval

5. “I value my garden more for being full of blackbirds than of cherries, and very frankly give them fruit for their songs.” -Joseph Addison

6. “Birds are indicators of the environment. If they are in trouble, we know we’ll soon be in trouble.” -Roger Tory Peterson

7. “One swallow does not make a summer.” -Aristotle 8. “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

9. “When birds burp, it must taste like bugs.” -Bill Watterson 10. “In order to see birds it is necessary to become a part of the silence.” -Robert Lynd

11. “Within a budding grove, In April’s ear sang every bird his best.” -William Allingham

12. “The singing white-throat poured my gladness out, And spread my golden wonder through the trees.” -Anonymous

13. “Birds delight, Day and night; Nightingale In the dale, Lark in sky, Merrily, Merrily, merrily to welcome in the year.” -William Blake

14. “My birds, come back! the hollow sky Is weary for your note.” -Alice Brown

15. “There are notes of joy from the hang-bird and wren, And the gossip of swallows through all the sky.” -William Cullen Bryant

16. “Do you ask what the birds say? The Sparrow, the Dove, The Linnet and Thrush say, ‘I love and I love!’” -Samuel Taylor Coleridge

17. “That’s the wise thrush; he sings each song twice over, Lest you should think he never could recapture The first fine careless rapture!” -Robert Browning

18. “Oh, a wondrous bird is the pelican! His beak holds more than his belican. He takes in his beak Food enough for a week. But I’ll be darned if I know how the helican.” -Dixon Lanier Merritt

19. “Blackbirds are the cellos of the deep farms.” -Anne Stevenson

20. “Alone and warming his five wits, The white owl in the belfry sits.” -Alfred, Lord Tennyson

21. “The Poetry of earth is never dead: When all the birds are faint with the hot sun, And hide in cooling trees, a voice will run From hedge to hedge about the new-mown mead.” -John Keats

22. “Space is blue and birds fly through it.” -Werner Heisenberg

23. “The birds in the forest are silent. Just wait, soon. You will rest as well.” -Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

24. “‘Tis just like a summer birdcage in a garden; the birds that are without despair to get in, and the birds that are within despair, and are in a consumption, for fear they shall never get out.” -John Webster

25. “Nature’s decorations glisten Far above their usual trim; Birds on box and laurels listen, As so near the cherubs hymn.” -Christopher Smart

26. “And from Humming-Bird to Eagle, the daily existence of every bird is a remote and bewitching mystery.” -Thomas Wentworth Higginson

27. “They call it a peacock, but it’s just a chicken with a rainbow on its tail.” -Hank Ketcham

28. “It was wonderful cycling through the woods this evening. I was deafened with bird song.” -Noël Coward

29. “The robins were singing vespers in the high tree-tops, filling the golden air with their jubilant voices.” -L.M. Montgomery

30. “The sparrow is sorry for the peacock at the burden of its tail.” -Rabindranath Tagore

31. “I realized that if I had to choose, I would rather have birds than airplanes.” -Charles Lindbergh

32. “Hold fast to dreams, for if dreams die, life is a broken-winged bird that cannot fly.” -Langston Hughes

33. “Be as a bird perched on a frail branch that she feels bending beneath her, still she sings away all the same, knowing she has wings.” -Victor Hugo

34. “I hope you love birds too. It is economical. It saves going to heaven.” -Emily Dickinson 35. “Intelligence without ambition is a bird without wings.” -Salvador Dali 36. “Heavenly bodies are nests of invisible birds.” -Dejan Stojanovic

37. “Everyone likes birds. What wild creature is more accessible to our eyes and ears, as close to us and everyone in the world, as universal as a bird?” -David Attenborough

38. “I’d rather learn from one bird how to sing than teach ten thousand stars how not to dance.” -E.E. Cummings

39. “Birds learn how to fly, never knowing where the flight will take them.” -Mark Nepo

40. “Faith is the bird that feels the light when the dawn is still dark.” -Rabindranath Tagore 41. “Soft feathers cannot make a cruel bird kind.” -Munia Khan

42. “The bird is powered by its own life and by its motivation.” -A.P.J. Abdul Kalam

43. “I think we consider too much the good luck of the early bird and not enough the bad luck of the early worm.” -Franklin D. Roosevelt

44. “I am no bird; and no net ensnares me; I am a free human being with an independent will.” -Charlotte Brontë

45. “Poetry is like a bird, it ignores all frontiers.” -Yevgeny Yevtushenko

46. “Roosters: The cry of the male chicken is the most barbaric yawp in all of nature.” -Edward Abbey

47. “Every bird, every tree, every flower reminds me what a blessing and privilege it is just to be alive.” -Marty Rubin

48. “Autumn birds speak cheerful poetry from their berry-stained beaks.” -Terri Guillemets

49. “Birds of a feather flock together and crap on your car.” -Unknown

50. “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 is his life, large-brained, large-lunged, hot, ecstatic, his frame charged with buoyancy and his heart with song.” -John Burroughs

More from Kiki Wellington:

Sources:

25 Best Quotes About Birds To Help You Tweet With Delight. Semi-Delicate Balance. https://www.semidelicatebalance.com/quotes-about-birds/

50 Bird Quotes If You Want to Spread Your Wings and Fly. Everyday Power. https://everydaypower.com/bird-quotes/

Birds Quotes. BrainyQuote. https://www.brainyquote.com/topics/birds-quotes

Birds Quotes. Goodreads. https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/tag/birds

Ingram, L. (2019, January 4). 18 Awesome and Inspirational Quotes About Birds. Parade. https://parade.com/729444/leahingram/18-awesome-and-inspirational-quotes-about-birds/

Knowles, E. (2014). Oxford Dictionary of Quotations*. Oxford University Press.

Quotations about Birds. The Quote Garden. https://www.quotegarden.com/birds.html

Quotations about Peacocks. The Quote Garden. https://www.quotegarden.com/peacocks.html

Ratcliffe, S. (2004). The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations by Subject. Oxford University Press.

Van Buren, M. (1939). Quotations for Special Occasions. H.W. Wilson.

*This article contains affiliate links.