You cannot prevent the birds of sorrow from flying over your head, but you can prevent them from building nests in your hair. – Chinese Proverb
People live like birds in the woods: When the time comes, each must take flight. – Chinese Proverb
It is not only fine feathers that make fine birds. – Aesop
The birds are moulting. If only man could moult also — his mind once a year its errors, his heart once a year its useless passions. – James Allen
When thou seest an eagle, thou seest a portion of genius; lift up thy head! – William Blake
Everything perfect in its kind has to transcend its own kind, it must become something different and incomparable. In some notes the nightingale is still a bird; then it rises above its class and seems to suggest to every winged creature what singing is truly like. – Johann von Goethe
A late lark twitters from the quiet skies: And from the west, Where the sun, his days work ended, Lingers as in content, There falls on the old, gray city An influence luminous and serene, A shining peace. – William Ernest Henley
O fret not after knowledge — I have none, and yet my song comes native with the warmth. O fret not after knowledge — I have none, and yet the Evening listens. – John Keats
The bird let loose in Eastern skies, Returning fondly home, Neer stoops to earth her wing, nor flies Where idle warblers roam; But high she shoots through air and light, Above all low delay, Where nothing earthly bounds her flight, Nor shadow dims her way. – Thomas Moore
Inventive man has invented nothing — nothing from scratch. If he has produced a machine that in motion overcomes the law of gravity, he learned the essentials from the observation of birds. – Dorothy Thompson
She was not quite what you would call refined. She was not quite what you would call unrefined. She was the kind of person that keeps a parrot. – Mark Twain
To a man, ornithologists are tall, slender, and bearded so that they can stand motionless for hours, imitating kindly trees, as they watch for birds. – Gore Vidal
Did St Francis preach to the birds? Whatever for? If he really liked birds he would have done better to preach to the cats. – Rebecca West
Happier of happy though I be, like them I cannot take possession of the sky, mount with a thoughtless impulse, and wheel there, one of a mighty multitude whose way and motion is a harmony and dance magnificent. – William Wordsworth
