Birds have long been symbols of freedom, hope, and beauty, inspiring countless quotes that capture their grace and significance. Whether you’re seeking motivation, insight, or a touch of nature’s wisdom, this carefully curated collection of 72 inspiring quotes about birds offers something for everyone. From famous writers to poets and philosophers, these words celebrate the unique spirit of our feathered friends and the lessons they teach us about life.
1. “Pan, who and what art thou?" he cried huskily."I'm youth, I'm joy," Peter answered at a venture, "I'm a little bird that has broken out of the egg.” - J.M. Barrie
2. “It would have been hard for Fat Charlie to say exactly when the accumulation of birds on the wire mesh moved from interesting to terrifying. It was somewhere in the first hundred or so, anyway. And it was in the way they didn't coo, or caw, or trill, or song. They simply landed on the wire, and they watched him.” - Neil Gaiman
3. “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
4. “What is more cheerful, now, in the fall of the year, than an open-wood-fire? Do you hear those little chirps and twitters coming out of that piece of apple-wood? Those are the ghosts of the robins and blue-birds that sang upon the bough when it was in blossom last Spring. In Summer whole flocks of them come fluttering about the fruit-trees under the window: so I have singing birds all the year round.” - Thomas Bailey Aldrich
5. “You do not have to be good.You do not have to walk on your kneesfor a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.Meanwhile the world goes on.Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rainare moving across the landscapes,over the prairies and the deep trees,the mountains and the rivers.Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,are heading home again.Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,the world offers itself to your imagination,calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting –over and over announcing your placein the family of things.” - Mary Oliver
6. “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
7. “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
8. “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
9. “This is wonderful, wonderful! Be the bird. You are the bird. Sacrifice yourself to abandoned family values....” - Laurie Halse Anderson
10. “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
11. “Two turtle doves will show theeWhere my cold ashes lieAnd sadly murmuring tell theeHow in tears I did die” - Nikolai Gogol
12. “though what bird in the best of circumstances does not look a little stricken?” - Lorrie Moore
13. “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
14. “I paid the taxi driver, got out with my suitcase, surveyed my surroundings, and just as I was turning to ask the driver something or get back into the taxi and return forthwith to Chillán and then to Santiago, it sped off without warning, as if the somewhat ominous solitude of the place had unleashed atavistic fears in the driver's mind. For a moment I too was afraid. I must have been a sorry sight standing there helplessly with my suitcase from the seminary, holding a copy of Farewell's Anthology in one hand. Some birds flew out from behind a clump of trees. They seemed to be screaming the name of that forsaken village, Querquén, but they also seemed to be enquiring who: quién, quién, quién. I said a hasty prayer and headed for a wooden bench, there to recover a composure more in keeping with what I was, or what at the time I considered myself to be. Our Lady, do not abandon your servant, I murmured, while the black birds, about twenty-five centimetres in length, cried quién, quién, quién. Our Lady of Lourdes, do not abandon your poor priest, I murmured, while other birds, about ten centimetres long, brown in colour, or brownish, rather, with white breasts, called out, but not as loudly, quién, quién, quién, Our Lady of Suffering, Our Lady of Insight, Our Lady of Poetry, do not leave your devoted subject at the mercy of the elements, I murmured, while several tiny birds, magenta, black, fuchsia, yellow and blue in colour, wailed quién, quién, quién, at which point a cold wind sprang up suddenly, chilling me to the bone.” - Roberto Bolaño
15. “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
16. “Ron seems to be enjoying the celebrations.” said Hermione. “Don’t pretend you didn’t see him. He wasn’t exactly hiding it, was — ?”The door behind them burst open. To Harry’s horror, Ron came in, laughing, pulling Lavender by the hand. “Oh,” he said, drawing up short at the sight of Harry and Hermione.“Oops!” said Lavender, and she backed out of the room, giggling.There was a horrible, swelling, billowing silence. Hermione was staring at Ron, who refused to look at her. She walked very slowly and erectly toward the door. Harry glanced at Ron, who was looking relieved that nothing worse had happened.“Oppugno!” came a shriek from the doorway.Harry spun around [...] The little flock of birds was speeding like a hail of fat golden bullets toward Ron, pecking and clawing at every bit of flesh they could reach.“Gerremoffme!” he yelled, but with one last look of vindictive fury, Hermione wrenched open the door and disappeared through it. Harry thought he heard a sob before it slammed.” - J.K. Rowling
17. “A goose flies by a chart the Royal Geographic Society could not improve.” - Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
18. “…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
19. “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
20. “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
21. “He imagines a necessary joy in things that must fly to eat.” - Wendell Berry
22. “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
23. “The stork is voiceless because there is really nothing to say.” - Will Cuppy
24. “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
25. “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
26. “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
27. “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
28. “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
29. “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
30. “...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
31. “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
32. “The freedom of birds is an insult to me.” - Cormac McCarthy
33. “Wait," Honey said to herself, as she realized something amazing. "I’m already an excellent flyer. Maybe I can fight crime too.” - Emlyn Chand
34. “Hey, ants!" she shouted. "Please help. Anteater is very hungry, but cannot find any food.” - Emlyn Chand
35. “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
36. “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
37. “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
38. “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
39. “The crow flew closer, as if to hear its praises.” - Emma Donoghue
40. “In order to see birds it is necessary to become a part of the silence.” - Robert Lynd
41. “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
42. “The baloney weighed the raven down, and the shopkeeper almost caught him as he whisked out the delicatessen door.” - Peter S. Beagle
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. “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
48. “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
49. “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
50. “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
51. “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
52. “When a group of people sing together, we make up a chorus. When birds do, it's more like a whole symphony orchestra.” - Laura Erickson
53. “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
54. “If you dissect a bird / to diagram the tongue, / you'll cut the chord / articulating song.” - Sylvia Plath
55. “The woods would be quiet if no bird sang but the one that sang best.” - Henry Van Dyke
56. “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
57. “Heavenly bodies are nests of invisible birds.” - Dejan Stojanovic
58. “It's a very small object to be capable of doing many wonderful things, don't you think?""It does much more that that," Valkyrie said, opening up a game and showing it to him.His eyes widened. "What wonder is this?""It's called Angry Birds. Now do you believe me?” - Derek Landy
59. “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
60. “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
61. “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
62. “In her dance, she controlled the bright paper birds with invisible wires and threads. She played the human: heavy, tied to earth. Her dances weren't pretty or delightful, but they were magical, [...] They called her a dancer and a puppeteer and an artist. They might have called her a witch, and not the good kind either.” - Katherine Catmull
63. “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
64. “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
65. “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
66. “Birds teach us something very important: To whatever height you rise, you will finally come down to the ground!” - Mehmet Murat ildan
67. “And if they thought her aimless, if they thought her a bit mad, let them. It meant they left her alone. Marya was not aimless, anyway. She was thinking.” - Catherynne M. Valente
68. “Mr. Jamrach led me through the lobby and into the menagerie. The first was a parrot room, a fearsome screaming place of mad round eyes, crimson breasts that beat against bars, wings that flapped against their neighbours, blood red, royal blue, gypsy yellow, grass green. The birds were crammed along perches. Macaws hung upside down here and there, batting their white eyes, and small green parrots flittered above our heads in drifts. A hot of cockatoos looked down from on high over the shrill madness, high crested, creamy breasted. The screeching was like laughter in hell.” - Carol Birch
69. “Feed the birds in winter; in return, they will feed your soul with the look of gratitude!” - Mehmet Murat ildan
70. “There shall come a day when Birds shall be free... :) and humans will see...” - K. Hari Kumar
71. “Birdsong foamed in the hour-before-dawn garden.” - David Mitchell
72. “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
