Fine feathers don’t make fine birds.

Being a bird ain't all about flying and shitting from high places.

I have stated, that in the thirteen species of ground-finches, a nearly perfect gradation may be traced, from a beak extraordinarily thick, to one so fine, that it may be compared to that of a warbler.

Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken!

The bird that would soar above the plain of tradition and prejudice must have strong wings.

One should be light like a bird and not like a feather.

One should be light like a bird, and not like a feather.

A bird is like an instrument working according to mathematical law, and it is in the capacity of man to reproduce such an instrument

a bird is one egg’s way of becoming other eggs.

Every bird that flies has the thread of the infinite in its claw.

There is some of the same fitness in a man's building his own house that there is in a bird's building its own nest. Who knows but if men constructed their dwellings with their own hands, and provided food for themselves and families simply and honestly enough, the poetic faculty would be universally developed, as birds universally sing when they are so engaged? But alas! we do like cowbirds and cuckoos, which lay their eggs in nests which other birds have built, and cheer no traveller with their chattering and unmusical notes. Shall we forever resign the pleasure of construction to the carpenter?

I am not an ornithologist — I am a bird.

Hope is the thing with feathers

More room in your heart for love, for the trees! For the birds who own nothing — the reason they can fly.