“Our flying squirrel is in no proper sense a flyer. On the ground, he is more helpless than a chipmunk, because less agile. He can only sail or slide down a steep incline from the top of one tree to the foot of another.”

If America wishes to preserve her native birds, we must help supply what civilization has taken from them.

Science has done more for the development of western civilization in one hundred years than Christianity did in eighteen hundred years.

How many human aspirations are realized in their free, holiday-lives, and how many suggestions to the poet in their flight and song!

To regard the soul and body as one, or to ascribe to consciousness a physiological origin, is not detracting from its divinity; it is rather conferring divinity upon the body.

All birds are incipient or would-be songsters in the spring. I find corroborative evidence of this even in the crowing of the cock.

We now use the word ‘nature’ very much as our fathers used the word ‘God.’

Birds and animals probably think without knowing that they think; that is, they have not self-consciousness.

Some men are like nails, very easily drawn; others however are more like rivets never drawn at all.

The very idea of a bird is a symbol and a suggestion to the poet. A bird seems to be at the top of the scale, so vehement and intense is his life, large-brained, large-lunged, hot, ecstatic, his frame charged with buoyancy and his heart with song.

A man can get discouraged many times but he is not a failure until he begins to blame somebody else and stops trying.

Robin is one of the most native and democratic of our birds; he is one of the family, and seems much nearer to us than those rare, exotic visitants, as the orchard starling or rose-breasted grossbeak, with their distant, high-bred ways.

The spirit of man can endure only so much and when it is broken only a miracle can mend it.

To be thrilled by the stars at night; to be elated over a bird’s nest or a wildflower in spring – these are some of the rewards of the simple life.

There is a great deal of speculation in the eye of an animal, but very little science.

All the walks I want to take, all the books I want to read, and all the friends I want to see.

Most young people find botany a dull study. So it is, as taught from the text-books in the schools; but study it yourself in the fields and woods, and you will find it a source of perennial delight.