Quotes & Sayings About Ornithology

There is nothing in which the birds differ more from man than the way in which they can build and yet leave a landscape as it was before. — Robert Lynd

The chicken lives as if in a dream. She has no sense of reality. All the chicken's fright comes because they're always interrupting her reverie. The chicken is a sound sleep ... The chicken has plenty of inner life. To be honest, the only thing the chicken really has is inner life. Our vision of her inner life is what we call chicken. — Clarice Lispector

Music criticism should be to musicians what ornithology is to the birds. — Yuja Wang

Where did you hide your Mockingbirds?" he asks.
"Ornithology," she replies.
"You hid TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD with the bird books?" I ask.
Elena shrugs. "I was being ironic. — Paul Acampora

Aesthetics is to artists as ornithology is to birds. — Barnett Newman

It is much better to learn the elements of geology, of botany, or ornithology and astronomy by word of mouth from a companion than dully from a book. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

But in the early 1970s, we were not birdwatching. We were birding, and that made all the difference. We were out to seek, to discover, to chase, to learn, to find as many different kinds of birds as possible - and, in friendly competition, to try to find more of them than the next birder. We became a community of birders, with the complications that human societies always have; and although it was the birds that had brought us together, our story became a human story after all. — Kenn Kaufman

Aesthetics is for the artist like ornithology is for the birds. — Barnett Newman

Think of the following event: A collection of hieratic persons (from Harvard or some such place) lecture birds on how to fly. Imagine bald males in their sixties, dressed in black robes, officiating in a form of English that is full of jargon, with equations here and there for good measure. The bird flies. Wonderful confirmation! They rush to the department of ornithology to write books, articles, and reports stating that the bird has obeyed them, an impeccable causal inference. The Harvard Department of Ornithology is now indispensable for bird flying. It will get government research funds for its contribution. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

[I]t was [Barnett] Newman who made the famously wry remark, Aesthetics is for the artist as ornithology is for the birds, — Ross Wetzsteon

As for fowling, during the last years that I carried a gun my excuse was that I was studying ornithology, and sought only new or rare birds. But I confess that I am now inclined to think that there is a finer way of studying ornithology than this. It requires so much closer attention to the habits of the birds, that, if for that reason only, I have been willing to omit the gun. — Henry David Thoreau

Philosophy of science is about as useful to scientists as ornithology is to birds. — Richard Feynman

The average sparrow is something of a bore and the trouble is that all sparrows are average. — Will Cuppy

[Audubon's works are] the most splendid monuments which art has erected in honor of ornithology. — Georges Cuvier

A mown hay field appears, its blond stubble blackened by a flock of starlings. As I pass, the field seems to lift, peek to see what's under itself, then resettles. A pickup passes from the other direction. The flock lifts again and this time keeps rising, a narrowing swirl as if sucked through a pipe and then an unfurl of rhythm sudden sprung, becoming one entity as it wrinkles, smooths out, drifts down like a snapped bedsheet. Then swerves and shifts, gathers and twists. Murmuration: ornithology's word-poem for what I see. — Ron Rash