Top 80 Birds Are Not Quotes
#2. Turkeys, quails, and small birds, are here to be seen; but birds are not numerous in desart forests; they draw near to the habitations of men, as I have constantly observed in all my travels.
William Bartram
#3. Where do they go when they die? We hear of the elephant graveyards, where the elephants go to die, but how much more curious it is that birds are not falling out of the sky all the time, on our heads, at our feet, dying and falling and flopping to the ground. I rarely see a dead bird on the ground.
Sophy Burnham
#4. With a few exceptions, birds are not to be trusted; it is not normal to have such soft, vulnerable bodies bookended with slashing beaks and razor-sharp claws. It is as unnatural as an armed marshmallow.
Mallory Ortberg
#5. 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.
Jeremiah
#6. I am not one of those fat birds who feels miserable because models are thin. Frankly, I feel more insulted by the idea that unless I see other fat birds in fashion magazines, I will be reduced to a sniveling wreck of a human being.
Julie Burchill
#7. Wild beasts and birds are by right not the property merely of the people today, but the property of the unborn generations, whose belongings we have no right to squander.
Theodore Roosevelt
#8. Ravens are the birds I'll miss most when I die. If only the darkness into which we must look were composed of the black light of their limber intelligence. If only we did not have to die at all. Instead, become ravens.
Louise Erdrich
#9. Life is supposed to be fast, not slow. Spirits fly when worms are crawling; birds sing when the dead are moaning.
Robin Sacredfire
#10. Lonely trees are not lonely; they have their eternal companies: Songs of the birds; shadows of the clouds; lights of the Moon; whispers of the winds ... Lonely trees are not lonely!
Mehmet Murat Ildan
#11. You would not think that birds who have no brain at all could become so friendly. I swear some of them are more intelligent than many humans, but that says more about our fellow beings than it does about the birds.
Elizabeth Aston
#12. Our followers are like bees which live among birds. None of the birds recognize the bees because of their small size and weakness. They would not treat them this way if they realized that these very small bees can carry honey which is very valuable in their stomachs.
Hazrat Ali Ibn Abu-Talib A.S
#13. Many images of animals, mammals or birds, resurface regularly in my narratives. They are not symbols, but chromatic benchmarks. For me, music has always been the perfect construction - an inaccessible ideal.
Dumitru Tepeneag
#14. Butterflies ... not quite birds, as they were not quite flowers, mysterious and fascinating as are all indeterminate creatures
Elizabeth Goudge
#15. You are not too small. No one is ever too small to offer help.
Emlyn Chand
#16. If the birds sing, the nudes are not far off.
John Hawkes
#17. Birds of prey and fierce piranha enter not into Nirvana, where are neither thorns nor nettles, only soft and fragrant petals.
John Biccard
#18. What does it matter, she thought, if businesses are left unattended, if people are not always as we want them to be; we need the time just to be human, to enjoy something like this: a boy chasing ants, a dry land drinking at last, birds in the the sky, a rainbow.
Alexander McCall Smith
#19. Justice and mercy/ Are human dreams, they do not concern the birds nor the fish nor eternal God.
Robinson Jeffers
#20. One reason why birds and horses are not unhappy is because they are not trying to impress other birds and horses.
Dale Carnegie
#21. Words are like wild birds - they will come when they wish, not when they are bidden.
Joyce Carol Oates
#22. It is not the diamonds or the birds, the people or the potatoes; it is not any of the nouns. The miracle is the adverbs, the way things are done. It is the way love gets done despite every catastrophe.
Daniel Handler
#23. In practice people who study philosophy too long become very odd birds, not to say thoroughly vicious; while even those who are the best of them are reduced by ... [philosophy] to complete uselessness as members of society.
Plato
#24. All I know of birds to this date is that sparrows are the ones that are not pigeons.
Alan Coren
#25. Falling from the sky like the rain,
And I fly and sing like the little birds...,
Movements that are not in vain,
Everything has a life made of words.
Ana Claudia Antunes
#26. I don't spend that much time being introspective, believe it or not. All I know is that I grew up not questioning God because that's how you are. God was there like the birds and the wind.
Jane Goodall
#27. Birds know themselves not to be at the center of anything, but at the margins of everything. The end of the map. We only live where someone's horizon sweeps someone else's. We are only noticed on the edge of things; but on the edge of things, we notice much.
Gregory Maguire
#28. Information is not just something you download from the Web. The way trees grow and where birds choose to live are much better signs of water quality than all the data being collected by the EPA.
Natalie Jeremijenko
#29. I learned that adults were not soaring gods, but rather back-yard birds with broken wingtips.
When you are thirteen, about to free-fall into the real world, discovering the broken wingtips is terrifying.
Janet Turpin Myers
#30. Our correspondences have wings - paper birds that fly from my house to yours - flocks of ideas crisscrossing the country. Once opened, a connection is made. We are not alone in the world.
Terry Tempest Williams
#31. Memphis - it's just a bird. Birds fly around, brother. It's what they do. It's not following you, and it's not a sign. Unless you really did give it candy and flowers, in which case you are one strange brother.
Libba Bray
#32. I think the birds in the area are dying laughing watching me try not to crash.
Cynthia Hand
#33. Okay. I picked up a movie to watch tonight. You can watch it with me if you like. It's a chick movie. Merri Lee said that means girls like it, not that there are small birds in it.
Anne Bishop
#34. Verses are not, as people think, feelings (those one has early enough)
they are experiences. For the sake of a verse one must see many cities, men, and things, one must know the animals feel how birds fly, and know the gesture with which the little flowers open in the morning.
Rainer Maria Rilke
#35. These are just the rules and regulations Of the birds, and the bees The earth, and the trees, Not to mention the gods, not to mention the gods.
Rufus Wainwright
#36. You think people are some kind of pure, white feathered birds flying in the clouds. They're not. They're pigs and they love to wallow in the mud and dirt.
Fannie Flagg
#37. The most beautiful birds do not know how beautiful they are until they see their reflection in water.
Matshona Dhliwayo
#38. I'm not very interesting. Birds are interesting. I could stand there lip-synching all day long, but it would feel funny, and people would be able to tell. I'm not a good actress.
Neko Case
#39. Would that not be the final humbling of the human condition? That the trees and birds, the fox and the rabbit, the wolf and the deer ... reach a point at which they do not even notice us, as we are transformed.
Jeff VanderMeer
#40. They are the carrion birds of humanity ... [speaking of the Jews] are a state within a state. They are certainly not real citizens ... The evils of Jews do not stem from individuals but from the fundamental nature of these people.
Napoleon Bonaparte
#41. You bad birds,
But God shall not punish you, you
Shall be with us in heaven, though less
Conscious of your happiness, perhaps, than we.
Hell is a not quite satisfactory heaven, probably,
But you are the fruit and jewels
Of my arrangement ...
John Ashbery
#42. The garden, historically, is the place where all the senses are exploited. Not just the eye, but the ear - with water, with birds. And there is texture, too, in plants you long to touch.
William Howard Adams
#43. Physical existence is so cramped.We grow old and bent over like embryos.Nine months passes;it is time to be born. The lamb wants to graze green daylight. There are ways of being born twice,of coming to where you fly,not individually like birds, but as the sun moves with his bride,sincerity.
Rumi
#44. I'm not perfect and I know it. I've done all sorts of things that are frowned upon these days - big-game hunting, fishing. I still enjoy fishing but I don't kill warm-blooded animals any more - I make an exception with birds sometimes.
Wilbur Smith
#45. Those ignoramuses who think that birds are happy in their cages know not a single thing about freedom!
Mehmet Murat Ildan
#46. Human beings are the only animal that thinks they change who they are simply by moving to a different place. Birds migrate, but it's not quite the same thing.
Douglas Coupland
#47. The respiratory mechanisms of birds are definitely adapted to the function of flight, as evidenced by the fact that birds which do not fly (Apteryx, Penguins) show these adaptations in a greatly reduced form.
August Krogh
#48. The calls of birds and the traces left by wolves to mark off their territories are no less forms of language than the sings of humans. What is distinctively human is not the capacity for language. It is the crystallisation of language in writing.
John N. Gray
#49. The only birds I know about are the duck and the dove and the quail, birds that you shoot. You're not really supposed to shoot cardinals. I don't know if I'd shoot this bird. It looks pretty mean. This bird might pull a gun out and shoot right back at you.
Josh McCown
#50. Those you love will not drown or burn. They will fly away.' ... 'Now we both have people we love who are like birds. They have flown far from anything in this world that can hurt them. They're flying away still.
Alice Hoffman
#51. Dinosaurs are built just like birds - they can squat down, they can get up. Mammals, when we lay down, we throw our legs out to the sides - birds cannot do that. Dinosaurs could not do that either.
Jack Horner
#52. Birds in flight, claims the architect Vincenzo Volentieri, are not between places - they carry their places with them. We never wonder where they live: they are at home in the sky, in flight. Flight is their way of being in the world.
Geoff Dyer
#53. The kingdom of birds is divided into two departments - birds and House Sparrows. House Sparrows are not real birds - they are little beasts!
Henry Van Dyke
#54. Owls are known as lonely birds; but it is not known that they have the forest as their best friend!
Mehmet Murat Ildan
#55. I'm still not sure what is meant by good fortune and success. I know fame and power are for the birds. But then life suddenly comes into focus for me. And, ah, there stand my kids.
Lee Iacocca
#56. 26"Look at the birds of the air, for they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns; yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they?
Phil Robertson
#57. Wisdom teaches us that none but birds should go out early, and that not even birds should do it unless they are out of worms.
Mark Twain
#58. Devils are depicted with bats' wings and good angels with birds' wings, not because anyone holds that moral deterioration would be likely to turn feathers into membrane, but because most men like birds better than bats.
C.S. Lewis
#59. Birds are flyin' south for winter. Here's the Weird-Bird headin' north, Wings a-flappin', beak a-chatterin', Cold head bobbin' back 'n' forth. He says, It's not that I like ice Or freezin' winds and snowy ground. It's just sometimes it's kind of nice To be the only bird in town.
Shel Silverstein
#60. She told them simply and directly that the meadow was a place of peace and beauty, where indeed if one came to it in a quiet manner, the animals would not be disturbed; for there are lovely birds, and squirrels and field mice, and sometimes deer.
Kathryn Lasky
#61. The birds are the saints, who fly to heaven on the wings of contemplation, who are so removed from the world that they have no business on earth. They do not labour, but by contemplation alone they already live in heaven.
Anthony Of Padua
#62. I have read in books that we are called 'caged birds'. I cannot speak for others, but I had so much in this cage of mine that there was not room for it in the universe- at least that is what I then felt.
Rabindranath Tagore
#63. Laistrygonians. Cannibals. Northern Giants. Sasquatch legend. Yep, yep. They are not birds. Not birds of North America.
Rick Riordan
#64. Vultures are the most righteous of birds: they do not attack even the smallest living creature.
Plutarch
#65. It's not the fledgling birds that are thrown out of the nest by their parents and made to fly; it's the parents who are made to get the hell out of cozy family nest by their teenage offspring. It's we who are made to be independent of them, crash-landing if we don't manage it.
Rosamund Lupton
#66. I'm not prepared for Rue's family. Her parents, whose faces are still fresh with sorrow. Her fiver younger siblings, who resemble her so closely. The slight builds, the luminous brown eyes. They form a flock of small dark birds.
Suzanne Collins
#67. Birds are colder than animals that live on the earth, because they are not conceived in such intense and heated desire. Just as birds are lifted up into the air by their feathers and can remain wherever they wish, the soul in the body is elevated by thought and spreads its wings everywhere.
Jenny Offill
#68. For their size, crows are among the brainiest organisms on Earth, outclassing not only other birds (with the possible exception of parrots), but also most mammals.
Candace Savage
#69. Shall I not rejoice also at the abundance of the weeds whose seeds are the granary of the birds?
Henry David Thoreau
#70. Wings are not only for birds; they are also for minds. Human potential stops at some point somewhere beyond infinity.
Toller Cranston
#71. Pass not beneath, O Caravan, or pass not singing. Have you heard
That silence where the birds are dead yet something pipeth like a bird?
James Elroy Flecker
#72. I do not believe that any peacock envies another peacock his tail, because every peacock is persuaded that his own tail is the finest in the world. The consequence of this is that peacocks are peaceable birds.
John Ruskin
#73. The sky and the earth and the waters and the things that are in them, the fishes, and the birds and the trees are not evil. All these are good; it is evil men who make this evil world.
Saint Augustine
#74. For the birds there is not a time that they tell, but the point vierge between darkness and light, between being and nonbeing. You can tell yourself the time by their waking, if you are experienced. But that is your folly, not theirs.
Thomas Merton
#75. Evolutionary biologists are not content merely to explain how variation occurs within limits, however. They aspire to answer a much broader question-which is how complex organisms like birds, and flowers, and human beings came into existence in the first place.
Phillip E. Johnson
#76. The white men in the East are like birds. They are hatching out their eggs every year, and there is not room enough in the East, and they must go elsewhere; and they come out West, as you have seen them coming for the last few years.
George Crook
#77. Make no mistake about it. These are not 'kookie' birds. Right now the greatest player, the big tent on the political scene in America, is called the Tea Party movement.
Dick Armey
#78. As the art of life is learned, it will be found at last that all lovely things are also necessary; a wild flower by the wayside, tended corn, wild birds and creatures of the forest, as well as the tended cattle; because man doth not live by bread only.
John Ruskin
#79. This is not just about bumblebees, but about creating a future environment for our children to enjoy, where there are still flowers, bees, butterflies and birds, and healthy crops to eat.
Dave Goulson
#80. [Barnabas speaks] "I will drink water."
"Water? But water is not fit for men to drink. For the cattle, for birds and beast, but a man needs ale ... or wine, if you are a Frenchman." [William answers]
Louis L'Amour
