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

“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

Half the modern drugs could well be thrown out the window, except that the birds might eat them. – Martin H. Fischer (1879–1962)