“No man had ever heard a nightingale,
When once a keen-eyed naturalist was stirred
To study and define — what is a bird.”

— Emma Lazarus

Critic and Poet: an Epilogue http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/critic-and-poet-an-epilogue/

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "No man had ever heard a nightingale, When once a keen-eyed naturalist was stirred To study and define — what is a bir…" by Emma Lazarus?

Emma Lazarus photo

Emma Lazarus15

American poet 1849–1887

Related quotes

“Agesilaus being invited once to hear a man who admirably imitated the nightingale, he declined, saying he had heard the nightingale itself.”

Plutarch (46–127) ancient Greek historian and philosopher

Life of Agesilaus II
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

“I have heard an atheist defined as a man who had no invisible means of support.”

John Buchan (1875–1940) British politician

A play on words commonly used referring to vagrants or paupers as having "no visible means of support" financially, speaking to the Law Society of Upper Canada, (21 February 1936); published in Canadian Occasions (1940), p. 201. Buchan's source for this definition remains unknown. The witticism was repeated by Harry Emerson Fosdick in his On Being a Real Person (1943), ch. 1, with due acknowledgement to Buchan, and was again used by Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen in Look magazine (December 14, 1955). The credit for this line is therefore often wrongly given to Fosdick or to Sheen. Credit has also been given to the conductor Walter Damrosch (1862-1950).
Canadian Occasions (1940)

“A nightingale dies for shame if another bird sings better.”

Robert Burton book The Anatomy of Melancholy

Section 2, member 3, subsection 6.
The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), Part I

“It is the hour when from the boughs
The nightingale's high note is heard;
It is the hour when lovers' vows
Seem sweet in every whisper'd word.”

George Gordon Byron Parisina

Parisina, Stanza 1, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).

“At the close of the day when the hamlet is still,
And mortals the sweets of forgetfulness prove,
When naught but the torrent is heard on the hill,
And naught but the nightingale’s song in the grove.”

James Beattie (1735–1803) Scottish poet, moralist and philosopher

The Hermit

“But when the country, into which I had just set my foot, was set on fire about my ears, it was time to stir. It was time for every man to stir.”

Thomas Paine (1737–1809) English and American political activist

The Crisis No. VII
1770s, The American Crisis (1776–1783)

“Every step in human progress, from the first feeble stirrings in the abyss of time, has been opposed by the great majority of men. Every valuable thing that has been added to the store of man's possessions has been derided by them when it was new, and destroyed by them when they had power. They have fought every new truth ever heard of, and they have killed every truth-seeker who got into their hands.”

H.L. Mencken (1880–1956) American journalist and writer

Homo Neanderthalensis Baltimore Sun (June 29th, 1925), The Impossible Mencken
1920s

“A wise old owl once lived in a wood, the more he heard the less he said, the less he said the more he heard, let's emulate that wise old bird.”

Flann O'Brien book At Swim-Two-Birds

Source: At Swim-Two-Birds

“A light broke in upon my brain, —
It was the carol of a bird;
It ceased, and then it came again,
The sweetest song ear ever heard.”

George Gordon Byron The Prisoner of Chillon

The Prisoner of Chillon, st. 10.

“The man could be frightfully keen…except when he was utterly obtuse.”

David D. Levine (1961) science fiction writer

Source: Arabella and the Battle of Venus (2017), Chapter 16, “Espionage” (p. 246)

Related topics