39 Inspiring Quotes About Birds

Birds have long fascinated humanity with their beauty, grace, and ability to traverse the skies. These feathered creatures inspire us not only with their spectacular flights and vibrant colors but also with their symbolic meanings across cultures. From embodying freedom and hope to representing transformation and resilience, birds continue to captivate our imaginations. In this collection of 39 inspiring quotes, we delve into the wisdom and musings of thinkers, poets, and naturalists who have drawn inspiration from our avian friends. Whether you're an avid birdwatcher or simply someone who admires the elegance of birds, these quotes are sure to uplift your spirit and offer new perspectives.

1. “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

2. “You'll think this is a bit silly, but I'm a bit--well, I have a thing about birds.""What, a phobia?""Sort of.""Well, that's the common term for an irrational fear of birds.""What do they call a rational fear of birds, then?” - Neil Gaiman

3. “Newborn babies can't do much on their own-They can't eat or walk or talk on the phone-But every parent is sure their creation is without a doubt a tremendous sensation.” - Jennifer Davis

4. “I speculate over some of the Anglo nomenclature of birds: Wilson's snipe, Forster's tern . . . : What natural images do these names conjure up in our minds? What integrity do we give back to the birds with our labels.” - Terry Tempest Williams

5. “A goose flies by a chart the Royal Geographic Society could not improve.” - Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

6. “…I keep looking for one more teacher, only to find that fish learn from the water and birds learn from the sky.” (p.275)” - Mark Nepo

7. “The stork is voiceless because there is really nothing to say.” - Will Cuppy

8. “It's time to make love, douse the glim; The fireflies twinkle and dim; The stars lean together Like birds of a feather, And the loin lies down with the limb.” - Conrad Aiken

9. “...as the slow sea sucked at the shore and then withdrew, leaving the strip of seaweed bare and the shingle churned, the sea birds raced and ran upon the beaches. Then that same impulse to flight seized upon them too. Crying, whistling, calling, they skimmed the placid sea and left the shore. Make haste, make speed, hurry and begone; yet where, and to what purpose? The restless urge of autumn, unsatisfying, sad, had put a spell upon them and they must flock, and wheel, and cry; they must spill themselves of motion before winter came.” - Daphne du Maurier

10. “We ate the birds. We ate them. We wanted their songs to flow up through our throats and burst out of our mouths, and so we ate them. We wanted their feathers to bud from our flesh. We wanted their wings, we wanted to fly as they did, soar freely among the treetops and the clouds, and so we ate them. We speared them, we clubbed them, we tangled their feet in glue, we netted them, we spitted them, we threw them onto hot coals, and all for love, because we loved them. We wanted to be one with them. We wanted to hatch out of clean, smooth, beautiful eggs, as they did, back when we were young and agile and innocent of cause and effect, we did not want the mess of being born, and so we crammed the birds into our gullets, feathers and all, but it was no use, we couldn’t sing, not effortlessly as they do, we can’t fly, not without smoke and metal, and as for the eggs we don’t stand a chance. We’re mired in gravity, we’re earthbound. We’re ankle-deep in blood, and all because we ate the birds, we ate them a long time ago, when we still had the power to say no.” - Margaret Atwood

11. “That was the thing about Levantin: he loved the birds, but he really loved the places they brought him. When you spend your career in the confines of a gray suit, the pipits at dawn above timberline are even more wondrous.” - Mark Obmascik

12. “What I saw was just one eyeIn the dawn as I was going:A bird can carry all the skyIn that little button glowing.Never in my life I wentSo deep into the firmament.” - Harold Monro

13. “Here is the soundless cypress on the lawn:It listens, listens. Taller trees beyondListen. The moon at the unruffled pondStares. And you sing, you sing.That star-enchanted song falls through the airFrom lawn to lawn down terraces of sound,Darts in white arrows on the shadowed ground;And all the night you sing.My dreams are flowers to which you are a beeAs all night long I listen, and my brainReceives your song, then loses it againIn moonlight on the lawn.Now is your voice a marble high and white,Then like a mist on fields of paradise,Now is a raging fire, then is like ice,Then breaks, and it is dawn.” - Harold Monro

14. “...it occurred that the birds, whose twitters and repeated songs sounded so pretty and affirming of nature and the coming day, might actually, in a code known only to other birds," be the birds each saying 'Get away' or 'This branch is mine!' or 'This tree is mine! I'll kill you! Kill, kill!' Or any manner of dark, brutal, or self-protective stuff--they might be listening to war cries. The thought came from nowhere and made his spirits dip from some reason.” - David Foster Wallace

15. “The sun tells the best joke of a day full of them, setting so spectacularly that you can almost smell the tropical paradise lazing somewhere over this rim of endless, gray socialist towers. Miles of square windows explode orange, red, and purple, like a million TV sets broadcasting the apocalypse. Clouds unspool. The sky drains of birds.” - Tod Wodicka

16. “Wait," Honey said to herself, as she realized something amazing. "I’m already an excellent flyer. Maybe I can fight crime too.” - Emlyn Chand

17. “Hey, ants!" she shouted. "Please help. Anteater is very hungry, but cannot find any food.” - Emlyn Chand

18. “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

19. “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

20. “I don’t know [why we're here]. People sometimes say to me, ‘Why don’t you admit that the humming bird, the butterfly, the Bird of Paradise are proof of the wonderful things produced by Creation?’ And I always say, well, when you say that, you’ve also got to think of a little boy sitting on a river bank, like here, in West Africa, that’s got a little worm, a living organism, in his eye and boring through the eyeball and is slowly turning him blind. The Creator God that you believe in, presumably, also made that little worm. Now I personally find that difficult to accommodate…” - David Attenborough

21. “Once upon a time, when women were birds, there was the simple understanding that to sing at dawn and to sing at dusk was to heal the world through joy. The birds still remember what we have forgotten, that the world is meant to be celebrated.” - Terry Tempest Williams

22. “In order to see birds it is necessary to become a part of the silence.” - Robert Lynd

23. “In winter, you fed the birds; and in summer, do the same thing! In winter, you gave them bread; and in summer, give them water!” - Mehmet Murat ildan

24. “when that small Siberian bird fell out of the sky over Gray's River, not once but twice, he brought with him the sweetness of chance in any place, the certainty of wonder in all places. And if that's not grace, I don't know what it.” - Robert Michael Pyle

25. “As I stood on the lonely backroad, I'm sure I heard birds, kookaburras, laughing ...” - Steven Herrick

26. “If we learn to read the birds-and their behaviors and vocalizations-through them, we can read the world at large... if we replace collision with connection, learn to read these details, feel at home, relax, and are respectful--ultimately the birds will yield to us the first rite of passage: a close encounter with an animal otherwise wary of our presence.” - Jon Young

27. “When sad she brings the thunderAnd her tears, they bring the rainWhen ill she feeds a poisonTo us all to fell her painHer smiles they bring the sunshineAnd the laughter and the windAnd the birds they go on singingAnd the world is whole again. "Smile, sweet Sunday," Wednesday whispered in her ear. "The birds need your love so they can lift their wings.” - Alethea Kontis

28. “I think if we all gardened more, they and all of the other birds that fly in the air above and light in my garden below would be better off. I know that God values them no less than I do. So when I plant in spring I also hope to taste of God in fruit of summer sun and sight of feathered friends.” - Vigen Guroian

29. “If it were not for collectors England would be full, so to speak, of rare birds and wonderful butterflies, strange flowers and a thousand interesting things. But happily the collector prevents all that, either killing with his own hands or, by buying extravagantly, procuring people of the lower classes to kill such eccentricities as appear. ...Eccentricity, in fact, is immorality--think over it again if you do not think so now--just as eccentricity in one's way of thinking is madness (I defy you to find another definition that will fit all the cases of either); and if a species is rare it follows that it is not Fitted to Survive. The collector is after all merely like the foot soldier in the days of heavy armour-he leaves the combatants alone and cuts the throats of those who are overthrown. So one may go through England from end to end in the summer time and see only eight or ten commonplace wild flowers, and the commoner butterflies, and a dozen or so common birds, and never be offended by any breach of the monotony.” - H.G. Wells

30. “Grandmother walked up over the bare granite and thought about birds in general. It seemed to her no other creature had the same dramatic capacity to underline and perfect events -- the shifts in the seasons and the weather, the changes that run through people themselves. p.33” - Tove Jansson

31. “Heavenly bodies are nests of invisible birds.” - Dejan Stojanovic

32. “She decided to free herself, dance into the wind, create a new language. And birds fluttered around her, writing “yes” in the sky.” - Monique Duval

33. “I saw a pair of great tits some days ago. (Massingham Major, you are a dirty-minded boy, and if you snigger again, you will do five hundred lines.) The squeaking-wheel song of Parus major is always gladsome, a precursor to interesting scenes at the bird table. On this occasion, however, what hearing and seeing the two greenery-yallery Paridæ first called up in me was a memory from last year’s early Springtide: an ærial near-collision. A very young squirrel – native red, I am rejoiced to say – was leaping from one tree trunk to another, adjacent, just as a great tit was exploding outwards in flight from the second tree. You never saw a more indignant bird or a more startled squirrel in your life.” - G.M.W. Wemyss

34. “Or awa’ upon Islay, in January, the wind was honed to a cutting edge across the queer flatness of Loch Gorm and the strand and fields ’round. The roe deer had taken shelter in good time and the brown trout had sought deeper waters. An auld ram alone huddled against the wind, that had swept clear the skies even of eagle, windcuffer, and goose. The scent of saltwater rode the wind over the freshwater loch, and the dry field-grasses rattled, and there was the memory of peat upon the air: a whisky wind in Islay. The River Leòig was forced back upon itself as the wind whipped the loch to whitecaps; only the cairn and the Standing Stones stood unyielding in the blast as of old.” - G.M.W. Wemyss

35. “For the author as for God, standing outwith his creation, all times are one; all times are now. In mine own country, we accept as due and right – as very meet, right, and our bounden duty – the downs and their orchids and butterflies, the woods and coppices, ash, beech, oak, and field maple, rowan, wild cherry, holly, and hazel, bluebells in their season and willow, alder, and poplar in the wetter ground. We accept as proper and unremarkable the badger and the squirrel, the roe deer and the rabbit, the fox and the pheasant, as the companions of our walks and days. We remark with pleasure, yet take as granted, the hedgerow and the garden, the riot of snowdrops, primroses, and cowslips, the bright flash of kingfishers, the dart of swallows and the peaceful homeliness of house martins, the soft nocturnal glimmer of glow worm and the silent nocturnal swoop of owl.” - G.M.W. Wemyss

36. “She wasn't a cruel Bird. But her heart ached so badly for these sad, broken birds that, just as the Puppeteer had planned, she had begun to hate them. She hated them for making her feel so wretched, when she should be happiest. That happens sometimes.” - Katherine Catmull

37. “Birds teach us something very important: To whatever height you rise, you will finally come down to the ground!” - Mehmet Murat ildan

38. “قال لي إنه نشأ بقرية قرب جبل هناك، يسمونه جبل الطير، لأن طيوراً تأتي في كل عام، وتحط عنده، فتملأه الاجواء، ثم ترحل فجأة، بعدما يضحي طير بنفسه، بأن يدخل رأسه، في كوة بسفح الجبل، فيتلقف رأسه من داخلها شيء مجهول، فلا يفلته حتى يجف جسده، ويسقط ريشه، فتكون تلك اشارة لبقية الطير، كي يغطسوا في النيل، ويرحلوا في الليل” - يوسف زيدان - عزازيل

39. “Birdsong foamed in the hour-before-dawn garden.” - David Mitchell