Bird Quotes - Page 19

God is to us like the sky to a small bird, which cannot see its outer limits and cannot reach its distant horizons, but can only lose itself in the greatness and immensity of the blueness.

But the moment a bird was dead, no matter how beautiful it had been in life, the pleasure of possession became blunted for me.

The soul of man, like the bird in the shell, is still growing or ripening in sin or grace, till at last the shell breaks by death, and the soul flies away to the piece it is prepared for, and where it must abide forever.

How readily the bluebirds become our friends and neighbors when we offer them suitable nesting retreats!

Learn from nature. Stuff lives and stuff dies all the time, you know. Animals and birds and flowers. Trees come and go, and we come and go. Thats it. So we should all seize life and make the most of what we have while we can.

I will weep and wail for the mountains and take up a lament concerning the desert pastures. They are desolate and untraveled, and the lowing of cattle is not heard. The birds of the air have fled and the animals are gone.

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.

Success is full of promise till one gets it, and then it seems like a nest from which the bird has flown.

The woods would be quiet if no bird sang but the one that sang best.

Do you know how the naturalist learns all the secrets of the forest, of plants, of birds, of beasts, of reptiles, of fishes, of the rivers and the sea? When he goes into the woods the birds fly before him and he finds none; when he goes to the river bank, the fish and the reptile swim away and leave him alone. His secret is patience; he sits down, and sits still; he is a statue; he is a log.

You see only the beautiful things when you stand still. You only see things that you don't ordinarily notice. The birds are the prettiest things, I imagine.

For all his learning or sophistication, man still instinctively reaches towards that force beyond. Only arrogance can deny its existence, and the denial falters in the face of evidence on every hand. In every tuft of grass, in every bird, in every opening bud, there it is.

I suppose I am a sparrow, a stay-at-home bird.

What a cunning mixture of sentiment, pity, tenderness, irony surrounds adolescence, what knowing watchfulness! Young birds on their first flight are hardly so hovered around.

There are women who fly their falcons at any game, little birds and all.

Whoever is related to me in the height of his aspirations will experience veritable ecstasies of learning; for I come from heights that no bird ever reached in its flight, I know abysses into which no foot ever strayed.

This is me apologizing. I am a fool, a bird-brain, a liar and a horse-thief. I wouldn't touch a superlative again with an umbrella.

I think statues are great; they show what great people would look like if a bird sh*t all over them.

We are like the birds. We adapt. We sing.

I am no bird and no net ensnares me

Thanksgiving was nothing more than a pilgrim-created obstacle in the way of Christmas; a dead bird in the street that forced a brief detour.

Even big-bird gets sad sometimes

Like a bird, when his cage is opened, stays on his perch, dazzled by freedom, the postponed traveler does not see that his cage, with its bars of anxiety, it is open.

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

When the moon covers the sun, we have a solar eclipse. What do you call it when birds do that?