68 Inspiring Quotes About Birds

Birds have long been symbols of freedom, beauty, and inspiration, capturing our imagination with their graceful flight and melodious songs. Their presence in our lives often serves as a reminder of the limitless possibilities that exist beyond our immediate horizons. In their skies, we find a reflection of our own aspirations and dreams. As you explore this carefully curated collection of the top 68 inspiring quotes about birds, let their words take you on a journey of reflection and wonder, igniting your spirit and encouraging you to spread your wings toward new heights. Whether you're a nature enthusiast or simply in search of a bit of inspiration, these quotes are sure to uplift your soul and provide a fresh perspective on the world around you.

1. “The early bird gets the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese.” - Willie Nelson

2. “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

3. “The reason birds can fly and we can't is simply because they have perfect faith, for to have faith is to have wings.” - J.M. Barrie

4. “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

5. “Some birds are not meant to be caged, that's all. Their feathers are too bright, their songs too sweet and wild. So you let them go, or when you open the cage to feed them they somehow fly out past you. And the part of you that knows it was wrong to imprison them in the first place rejoices, but still, the place where you live is that much more drab and empty for their departure.” - Stephen King

6. “This is wonderful, wonderful! Be the bird. You are the bird. Sacrifice yourself to abandoned family values....” - Laurie Halse Anderson

7. “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

8. “though what bird in the best of circumstances does not look a little stricken?” - Lorrie Moore

9. “The call of the yellow-billed cuckoo of North America is often mistaken for a bloodhound drinking a bowl of milk. He goes coulp coulp coulp.” - Will Cuppy

10. “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

11. “The man was staring directly at him now, a curious expression on his face, half smiling, half quizzical. Instantly Eager had a sense of certainty far deeper than anything he had experienced so far. "I have it too!" he exclaimed. "I am a part of this Earth, aren't I? Just like the birds and the trees and the people - I am.""Om." said his companion.Unseen by them, a blossom fell.” - Helen Fox

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

13. “Small birds throw seeds out of the feeder; large birds pick them up off the ground, but the squirrels try to muscle in.” - Lilian Jackson Braun

14. “…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

15. “It was my uncle who taught me about the birds and the bees. He sat me down one day and said, 'Remember this, George, the birds fuck the bees.' Then he told me he once banged a girl so hard her freckles came off.” - George Carlin

16. “Sun-struck, stuck in mid tropic strut, it sometimes standsas if considering how to cool avian plastic,dive into the mown lagoon of lawn;how take flight on dayglow flap-doodle wings, no matterif it is ball-bald going nowhere fast.” - Joyce Thomas

17. “Somewhere a bird sang, its chant hanging plaintive and melancholy in the still air...I think it's a sort of lark or something. Our tradition has it that they sing with the voices of lost lovers. If the stars are smiling on them, you will hear its mate call back in a moment.” - Jane Johnson

18. “A male frigate bird blows up a wild red pouch on his neck. He can keep it puffed up for hours. It is his way of impressing the girls.” - Julie Murphy

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

20. “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

21. “...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

22. “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

23. “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

24. “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

25. “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

26. “Here is the door of my mom's house, well-remembered childhood portal. Here is the yard, and a set of wires that runs from the house to a wooden pole, and some fat birds sitting together on the wires, five of them lined up like beads on an abacus.” - Dan Chaon

27. “...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

28. “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

29. “The freedom of birds is an insult to me.” - Cormac McCarthy

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

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

32. “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

33. “And I said, 'A coal miner? Why did she want a coal miner if she could've had you?' And he said, 'Because when he sings ... even the birds stop to listen.” - Suzanne Collins

34. “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

35. “We proclaim human intelligence to be morally valuable per se because we are human. If we were birds, we would proclaim the ability to fly as morally valuable per se. If we were fish, we would proclaim the ability to live underwater as morally valuable per se. But apart from our obviously self-interested proclamations, there is nothing morally valuable per se about human intelligence.” - GaryLFrancione

36. “The crow flew closer, as if to hear its praises.” - Emma Donoghue

37. “I pray to the birds because they remind me of what I love rather than what I fear. And at the end of my prayers, they teach me how to listen.” - Terry Tempest Williams

38. “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

39. “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

40. “The robin flew from his swinging spray of ivy on to the top of the wall and he opened his beak and sang a loud, lovely trill, merely to show off. Nothing in the world is quite as adorably lovely as a robin when he shows off - and they are nearly always doing it.” - Frances Hodgson Burnett

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

42. “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

43. “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

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

45. “Tú, pájaro, vivirás en los árboles y volarás por los aires, alcanzarás la región de las nubes, rozarás la transparencia del cielo y no tendrás miedo de caer.” - Popol-Vuh

46. “Take this one to the bank: birds are hatched from eggs and are always egg-shaped. Maybe there's no escaping the shape that molds you, no getting around how you got started even if you do break out.” - Tupelo Hassman

47. “The past was like a bad dream; the future was all happy holiday as I moved Southwards week by week, easily, lazily, lingering as long as I dared, but always heeding the call!” - Kenneth Grahame

48. “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

49. “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

50. “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

51. “If you dissect a bird / to diagram the tongue, / you'll cut the chord / articulating song.” - Sylvia Plath

52. “If an ancient man saw planes two thousand years ago He would've thought they were birds Or angels from another world Or messengers from other planets.” - Dejan Stojanovic

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

54. “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

55. “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

56. “In East Sussex, let us say, an old farm sleeps in sun-dapple, its oast-house with its cowls echoing the distant steeple of SS Andrew and Mary, Fletching, where de Montfort had prayed and Gibbon now sleeps out a sceptic’s eternity. The Sussex Weald is quiet now, its bows and bowmen that did affright the air at Agincourt long dust. A Chalk Hill Blue spreads peaceable wings upon the hedge. Easter is long sped, yet yellow and lavender yet ornament the land, in betony and dyer’s greenweed and mallows. An inquisitive whitethroat, rejoicing in man’s long opening of the Wealden country, trills jauntily from atop a wall.” - G.M.W. Wemyss

57. “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

58. “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

59. “The bird music sank into her, like a song you used to know but forgot long ago. You hear a piano play it some day, and for a minute you feel a happy pain, but you don't know why. Bird felt like that.” - Katherine Catmull

60. “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

61. “In a world where thrushes sing and willow trees are golden in the spring, boredom should have been included among the seven deadly sins.” - Elizabeth Goudge

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

63. “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

64. “Feed the birds in winter; in return, they will feed your soul with the look of gratitude!” - Mehmet Murat ildan

65. “Wherever there are birds, there is hope.” - Mehmet Murat ildan

66. “There shall come a day when Birds shall be free... :) and humans will see...” - K. Hari Kumar

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

68. “In Our Woods, Sometimes a Rare MusicEvery springI hear the thrush singingin the glowing woodshe is only passing through.His voice is deep,then he lifts it until it seemsto fall from the sky.I am thrilled.I am grateful.Then, by the end of morning,he's gone, nothing but silenceout of the treewhere he rested for a night.And this I find acceptable.Not enough is a poor life.But too much is, well, too much.Imagine Verdi or Mahlerevery day, all day.It would exhaust anyone.” - Mary Oliver