Quotes about nightingale (52 quotes) | Quotes of famous people

“On the grave of this poor stranger, let there be neither lamp nor rose,
Let neither butterfly's wing burn nor nightingale sing.”

Nur Jahan (1577–1645) Padshah Begum of the Mughal Empire

epitaph on Nur Jahan's tomb, translated by Wheeler Thackston, quoted in "Nur Jahan", p. 275

Singing

“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

Bird , Singing

“O Brother! Not every sea hath pearls; not every branch will flower, nor will the nightingale sing thereon. Then, ere the nightingale of the mystic paradise repair to the garden of God, and the rays of the heavenly morning return to the Sun of Truth—make thou an effort, that haply in this dustheap of the mortal world thou mayest catch a fragrance from the everlasting garden, and live forever in the shadow of the peoples of this city. And when thou hast attained this highest station and come to this mightiest plane, then shalt thou gaze on the Beloved, and forget all else.”

Bahá'u'lláh (1817–1892) founder of the Bahá'í Faith

The Seven Valleys Of Bahá’u’lláh

God , People , Truth , World

“It is quiet and peaceful here, the air is good, there are numerous gardens, and in them nightingales sing and spies lurk under the bushes.”

Maxim Gorky (1868–1936) Russian and Soviet writer

Letter to Anton Chekhov http://books.google.com/books?id=rXsdAAAAMAAJ&q="It+is+quiet+and+peaceful+here+the+air+is+good+there+are+numerous+gardens+and+in++them+nightingales+sing+and+spies+lurk+under+the+bushes"&pg=PA28#v=onepage

Peace , Singing

“The breathing of the air,
The song of the sweet nightingale,
The grove and its beauty
In the serene night,
With the flame that consumes, and gives no pains. ~ 39”

John of the Cross (1542–1591) Spanish mystic and Roman Catholic saint

Spiritual Canticle of The Soul and The Bridegroom

Pain , Beauty , Night

“O YE PEOPLE THAT HAVE MINDS TO KNOW AND EARS TO HEAR!
The first call of the Beloved is this: O mystic nightingale! Abide not but in the rose-garden of the spirit. O messenger of the Solomon of love! Seek thou no shelter except in the Sheba of the well-beloved, and O immortal phoenix! dwell not save on the mount of faithfulness. Therein is thy habitation, if on the wings of thy soul thou soarest to the realm of the infinite and seekest to attain thy goal.”

Bahá'u'lláh book The Hidden Words

The Hidden Words

Love , People , Faith , Soul

“But you, you foolish girl, you have gone home to a leaky castle across the sea to lie awake in linen smelling of lavender, and hear the nightingale, and long for me.”

Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892–1950) American poet

Lie , Home , Girl , Sea

“Poetry is a rich, full-bodied whistle, cracked ice crunching in pails, the night that numbs the leaf, the duel of two nightingales, the sweet pea that has run wild, Creation’s tears in shoulder blades.”

Borís Pasternak (1890–1960) Russian writer

LIFE magazine (13 June 1960)

Tear , Night

“It is modest of the nightingale not to require anyone to listen to it; but it is also proud of the nightingale not to care whether any one listens to it or not.”

Sören Kierkegaard (1813–1855) Danish philosopher and theologian, founder of Existentialism

Source: The Present Age

“A poet is a nightingale, who sits in darkness and sings to cheer its own solitude with sweet sounds. His auditors are as men entranced by the melody of an unseen musician.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822) English Romantic poet

A Defence of Poetry http://www.bartleby.com/27/23.html (1821)

Men , Solitude , Singing

“Somewhere far away a bittern cried, a hollow, melancholy sound like a cow shut up in a barn. The cry of that mysterious bird was heard every spring, but no one knew what it was like or where it lived. At the top of the hill by the hospital, in the bushes close to the pond, and in the fields the nightingales were trilling. The cuckoo kept reckoning someone's years and losing count and beginning again. In the pond the frogs called angrily to one another, straining themselves to bursting, and one could even make out the words: "That's what you are! That's what you are!" What a noise there was! It seemed as though all these creatures were singing and shouting so that no one might sleep on that spring night, so that all, even the angry frogs, might appreciate and enjoy every minute: life is given only once.”

Anton Chekhov book In the Ravine

Source: In the Ravine (1900), Ch. 8, pp. 224

Life , Spring , Bird , Sleep

“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

Forgetting

“Through the gloomy clouds break / Blue sky, sunshine, / On the heights and in the valley / Sing the lark and the nightingale
God, I thank you that I live / Not forever in this world / Strengthen me that my soul rise / Upward toward your firmament.”

Caspar David Friedrich (1774–1840) Swedish painter

some poetry lines of Friedrich, c. 1802-05; as cited by C. D. Eberlein in C. D. Friedrich Bekenntnisse, p 57; as quoted & translated by Linda Siegel in Caspar David Friedrich and the Age of German Romanticism, Boston Branden Press Publishers, 1978, p. 48
1794 - 1840

God , World , Soul , Singing

“Nature gets credit which should in truth be reserved for ourselves: the rose for its scent, the nightingale for its song, and the sun for its radiance. The poets are entirely mistaken. They should address their lyrics to themselves and should turn them into odes of self-congratulation on the excellence of the human mind.”

Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947) English mathematician and philosopher

as cited in History, Humanity and Evolution (1989), p. 383.
1920s, Science and the Modern World (1925)

Truth , Nature , Sun

“Our homeward step was just as light/As the tap-dancing feet of Astaire/And, like an echo far away,/A nightingale sang in Berkeley Square”

Fred Astaire (1899–1987) American dancer, singer, actor, choreographer and television presenter

from Eric Maschwitz's lyrics to A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square with music by Manning Sherwin

Light , Dance

“Deceive not thyself by overexpecting happiness in the married estate. Remember the nightingales which sing only some months in the spring, but commonly are silent when they have hatched their eggs.”

Thomas Fuller (1608–1661) English churchman and historian

Of Marriage.
The Holy State and the Profane State (1642)

Spring , Singing , Happiness

“As in hunting, so in hawking, the sportsmen had their peculiar impressions, and therefore the tyro in the art of falconry is recommended to learn the following arrangement of terms as they were to be applied to the different kinds of birds assembled in companies. A sege of herons, and of bitterns; an herd of swans, of cranes, and of curlews; a dopping of sheldrakes; a spring of teels; a covert of cootes; a gaggle of geese; a badelynge of ducks; a sord or sute of mallards; a muster of peacoccks; a nye of pheasants; a bevy of quails; a covey of partridges; a congregation of plovers; a flight of doves; a dule of turtles; a walk of snipes; a fall of woodcocks; a brood of hens; a building of rooks; a murmuration of starlings; an exaltation of larks; a flight of swallows; a host of sparrows; a watch of nightingales; and a charm of goldfinches.”

Joseph Strutt (1749–1802) British engraver, artist, antiquary and writer

pg. 37
The Sports and Pastimes of the People of England (1801), Collective nouns

Art , Spring , Bird , Learning

“Death continued to stare at the emperor with his cold, hollow eyes, and the room was fearfully still. Suddenly there came through the open window the sound of sweet music. Outside, on the bough of a tree, sat the living nightingale. She had heard of the emperor's illness, and was therefore come to sing to him of hope and trust. And as she sung, the shadows grew paler and paler; the blood in the emperor's veins flowed more rapidly, and gave life to his weak limbs; and even Death himself listened, and said, "Go on, little nightingale, go on."”

Hans Christian Andersen book The Nightingale

The Nightingale
Fairy Tales (1835)

Life , Death , Hope , Music

“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)

“Sing, sweet nightingale,
Sing me a song of a night never-ending,
Sing, sweet nightingale,
And I'll try to pretend
That tomorrow's nowhere near
And there's nothing to fear.”

Tom Springfield (1934) English musician, songwriter and record producer

Song Morning Please Don't Come.

Fear , Singing , Night

“Whatever became of Kurt Schwitters' novel 'Franz Müllers Drahtfrühling' [Franz Müller's Wire Spring] several chapters of which we composed together? Is it buried under the bomb ruins of his house on Waldhausenstrasse in Hannover? For hours, Schwitters and I sat together and spun dialogue, in rhapsody. He took these writings and channeled them into his novel…We sat together again, writing 'Franz Müllers Drahtfrühling':
H. A.: The nightingales have had enough of your hymnal Karagösen. Play violin on parrots, but avoid the women red hood ans snow widow.
K. Schw.: Should I pe-trify something for you? Or would you like play cry together?
H. A.: Should we wash our tears or drown them?
K. Schw.: You are a sipsnipper, Since when do your diamonds bark?
H. A.: The water is getting hard. A fruit cries out loud and gives birth to a fish.
K. Schw.: I'll p-ut it in the sea, or should I st-ab you with it?”

Hans Arp (1886–1966) Alsatian, sculptor, painter, poet and abstract artist

Dialogue between Hans Arp and Kurt Schwitters, (1956) with introduction in: Franz Müllers Drahtfrühling-- Memories of Kurt Schwitters; as quoted in I is Style, ed. Siegfried Gohr & Gunda Luyken, commissioned by w:Rudi Fuchs, 2000, pp. 139-140
1950s

Women , Spring , Birth , Fish

“But it is of the past, it seems to me. Perhaps... Man and the nightingales were in the most favourable situation for imagining: for them the forest was a perfect dream-conductor..”

Max Ernst (1891–1976) German painter, sculptor and graphic artist

1910 - 1935, The mysteries of the forest' (1934)

Dreams , Imagination , Past , Perfection

“He stood beside a cottage lone
And listened to a lute,
One summer’s eve, when the breeze was gone,
And the nightingale was mute.”

Thomas Kibble Hervey (1799–1859) British poet and critic

The Devil's Progress (1849)

Summer

“O nightingale, that on yon bloomy spray
Warbl'st at eve, when all the woods are still.”

John Milton (1608–1674) English epic poet

Sonnet, To the Nightingale (c. 1637)

“Pack, clouds, away! and welcome, day!
With night we banish sorrow.
Sweet air, blow soft; mount, lark, aloft
To give my Love good-morrow!
Wings from the wind to please her mind,
Notes from the lark I'll borrow:
Bird, prune thy wing! nightingale, sing!”

Thomas Heywood (1574–1641) English playwright, actor, and author

Poem Matin Song http://www.bartleby.com/101/205.html

Love , Bird , Singing , Night

“Seek for a fresh invoice of grace. Unbelief can scoff or growl; faith is the nightingale that sings in the darkest hour. Faith can draw honey out of the rock and oil out of the flint. With Christ in possession and heaven in reversion, it marches to the time of the One-hundred-and-third Psalm over the roughest road, and against the most cutting blast.”

Theodore L. Cuyler (1822–1909) American minister

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 236.

Faith , Singing , Time , Christ

“There's a bower of roses by Bendemeer's stream,
And the nightingale sings round it all the day long;
In the time of my childhood 'twas like a sweet dream,
To sit in the roses and hear the bird's song.”

Thomas Moore (1779–1852) Irish poet, singer and songwriter

Part II.
Lalla Rookh http://www.columbia.edu/itc/mealac/pritchett/00generallinks/lallarookh/index.html (1817), Part I-III: The Veiled Prophet of Khorassan

Dreams , Bird , Singing , Time

“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 (1849–1887) American poet

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

Bird , Study

“Car crime's low, the gun crime's lower,
The town hall band CD, it's a grower,
You never hear of folk getting knocked on the bonce,
Although there was a drive-by shouting once,
But there's a brass band everywhere,
And I don't drive so I don't care,
And as a nightingale sang in Berkeley Square,
What's Chatteris if you're not there?
For What Is Chatteris?, Achtung Bono”

Nigel Blackwell

2005
Lyrics

Cars

“As though a tongueless nightingale should swell
Her throat in vain, and die, heart-stifled, in her dell.”

John Keats The Eve of St. Agnes

Stanza 23
Poems (1820), The Eve of St. Agnes

Heart

“But now he sleeps endlessly.
Now the moss and the grass
open with sure fingers
the flower of his skull.
And now his blood comes out singing;
singing along marshes and meadows,
slides on frozen horns,
faltering souls in the mist
stumbling over a thousand hoofs
like a long, dark, sad tongue,
to form a pool of agony
close to the starry Guadalquivir.
Oh, white wall of Spain!
Oh, black bull of sorrow!
Oh, hard blood of Ignacio!
Oh, nightingale of his veins!”

Federico García Lorca Llanto por Ignacio Sánchez Mejías

Pero ya duerme sin fin.
Ya los musgos y la hierba
abren con dedos seguros
la flor de su calavera.
Y su sangre ya viene cantando:
cantando por marismas y praderas,
resbalando por cuernos ateridos,
vacilando sin alma por la niebla,
tropezando con miles de pezuñas
como una larga, oscura, triste lengua,
para formar un charco de agonía
junto al Guadalquivir de las estrellas.
¡Oh blanco muro de España!
¡Oh negro toro de pena!
¡Oh sangre dura de Ignacio!
¡Oh ruiseñor de sus venas!
Llanto por Ignacio Sanchez Mejias (1935)

Sadness , Soul , Flowers , Sleep

“Pleasant, liquors of the mead-brewer to the multitude;
Also pleasant, a songster generous, amiable.
Pleasant, the open field to cuckoos and the nightingale;
Also pleasant when the weather is serene.”

Taliesin (534–599) Welsh bard

Book of Taliesin (c. 1275?), The Pleasant Things of Taliesin

Weather

“The very port and gait of a swan, or turkey, or peacock show the high idea he has entertain'd of himself; and his contempt of all others. This is the more remarkable, that in the two last species of animals, the pride always attends the beauty, and is discover'd in the male only. The vanity and emulation of nightingales in singing have been commonly remark'd […] All these are evident proofs, that pride and humility are not merely human passions, but extend themselves over the whole animal creation.”

David Hume book A Treatise of Human Nature

Part 1, Section 12
A Treatise of Human Nature (1739-40), Book 2: Of the passions

Beauty , Idea , Passion , Singing

“As the glossaries lengthen, as the footnotes become more elementary and didactic, the poem, the epic, the drama, move out of balance on the actual page. As even the more rudimentary of mythological, religious or historical references, which form the grammar of Western literature, have to be elucidated, the lines of Spenser, of Pope, of Shelley or of Sweeney Among the Nightingales, blur away from immediacy. Where it is necessary to annotate every proper name and classical allusion in the dialogue between Jessica and Lorenzo in the garden at Belmont, or in Iachimo's stealthy rhetoric when he emerges in Imogen's bedchamber, these marvellous spontaneities of enacted feeling become "literary" and twice-removed.”

George Steiner (1929–2020) American writer

"Tomorrow".
In Bluebeard's Castle (1971)

Feeling , Literature

“In the weightiest matters we must go to school to the animals, and learn spinning and weaving from the spider, building from the swallow, singing from the birds,—from the swan and the nightingale, imitating their art.”

Democritus Ancient Greek philosopher, pupil of Leucippus, founder of the atomic theory

Source Book in Ancient Philosophy (1907), The Golden Sayings of Democritus

School , Art , Bird , Learning

“There is no competition of sounds between a nightingale and a violin.”

Dejan Stojanovic (1959) poet, writer, and businessman

Dancing of Sounds http://www.poetrysoup.com/famous/poem/21378/Dancing_of_Sounds
From the poems written in English

“By the way, our nightingale language ranks second in the world in its melodiousness.”

Yurii Andrukhovych book The Moscoviad

The Moscoviad
Source: The Moscoviad. Yuri Andrukhovych. Spuyten Duyvil, New York City. ISBN1933132523, p. 83

World , Way

“The cypress stood up like a church
That night we felt our love would hold,
And saintly moonlight seemed to search
And wash the whole world clean as gold;
The olives crystallized the vales'
Broad slopes until the hills grew strong:
The fireflies and the nightingales
Throbbed each to either, flame and song.
The nightingales, the nightingales.”

Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806–1861) English poet, author

Bianca Among the Nightingales http://www.poemhunter.com/p/m/poem.asp?poet=3035&poem=127031, st. 1 (1862).

Love , World , Search , Strong

“Still are thy pleasant voices, thy nightingales, awake;
For Death, he taketh all away, but them he cannot take.”

William Johnson Cory (1823–1892) English educator and poet

Poem Heraclitus.

Death

“I have now learnt to despise you," he said. "You refused an honest prince; you did not appreciate the rose and the nightingale; but you did not mind kissing a swineherd for his toys; you have no one but yourself to blame!”

Hans Christian Andersen book The Swineherd

The Swineherd
Fairy Tales (1835)

Kiss

“Pooh! Pooh! Nonsense!' was the reply, 'that's all very well in theory, but it doesn't work so. The returning of slaves amounts to nothing in fact. All that is obsolete. And why make all this row? Can't you hush? We've nothing to do with slavery, we tell you. We can't touch it; and if you persist in this agitation about a mere form and theory, why, you're a set of pestilent fanatics and traitors; and if you get your noisy heads broken, you get just what you deserve'. And they quoted in the faces of the abolitionists the words of Governor Edward Everett, who was not an authority with them, in that fatal inaugural address, 'The patriotism of all classes of citizens must be invited to abstain from a discussion which, by exasperating the master, can have no other effect than to render more oppressive the condition of the slave'. It was as if some kindly Pharisee had said to Christ, 'Don't try to cast out that evil spirit; it may rend the body on departing'. Was it not as if some timid citizen had said, 'Don't say hard things of intemperance lest the dram-shops, to spite us, should give away the rum'? And so the battle raged. The abolitionists dashed against slavery with passionate eloquence like a hail of hissing fire. They lashed its supporters with the scorpion whip of their invective. Ambition, reputation, ortune, ease, life itself they threw upon the consuming altar of their cause. Not since those earlier fanatics of freedom, Patrick Henry and James Otis, has the master chord of human nature, the love of liberty, been struck with such resounding power. It seemed in vain, so slowly their numbers increased, so totally were they outlawed from social and political and ecclesiastical recognition. The merchants of Boston mobbed an editor for virtually repeating the Declaration of Independence. The city of New York looked on and smiled while the present United States marshal insulted a woman as noble and womanly and humane as Florence Nightingale. In other free States men were flying for their lives; were mobbed, seized, imprisoned, maimed, murdered; but still as, in the bitter days of Puritan persecution in Scotland, the undaunted voices of the Covenanters were heard singing the solemn songs of God that echoed and re-echoed from peak to peak of the barren mountains, until the great dumb wilderness was vocal with praise — so in little towns and great cities were heard the uncompromising voices of these men sternly intoning the majestic words of the Golden Rule and the Declaration of Independence, which echoed from solitary heart to heart until the whole land rang with the litany of liberty.”

George William Curtis (1824–1892) American writer

1850s, The Present Aspect of the Slavery Question (1859)

Love , Life , Men , God

“The rose looks out in the valley,
And thither will I go,
To the rosy vale, where the nightingale
Sings his song of woe.”

Gil Vicente (1456–1536) Portuguese writer

En la huerta nasce la rosa:
quiérome ir allá
por mirar al ruiseñor cómo cantavá.
En la huerta nace la rosa — "The Nightingale", as translated by John Bowring in Ancient Poetry and Romances of Spain (1824), p. 316

Singing

“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).

Lovers

“The soote season, that bud and bloom forth brings,
With green hath clad the hill, and eke the vale:
The nightingale with feathers new she sings;
The turtle to her make hath told her tale;
Summer is come, for every spray now springs.”

Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey (1516–1547) English Earl

"Description of Spring", line 1

Spring , Singing , Summer , Season

“He was known to his countrymen as the Nightingale, but his own sweet-sounding name of Bird's-meadow (Vogelweide) suggests even more directly the pure, true, flute-like strain which he poured into Europe’s choir of voices.”

Walther von der Vogelweide (1170–1230) Middle High German lyric poet

Laurie Magnus A General Sketch of European Literature in the Centuries of Romance (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., 1918) pp. 27-28.
Praise

Bird

“Night after night the nightingale came to beg for divine love, but though the rose trembled at the sound of his voice, her petals remained closed to him…
Flower and bird, two species never meant to mate. Yet at length the rose overcame her fear and from that single, forbidden union was born the red rose that Allah never intended the world to know.”

Susan Kay Phantom

Christine Daae (p. 433)
Phantom (1990)

Love , World , Fear , Flowers

“I saw a shady forest and therein a crowd of nightingales. The nightingales as to their breast were rough and hairy, and as to their feet some were like calves, some like panthers, and some like wolves, and they had beast's claws instead of toes.”

Max Ernst (1891–1976) German painter, sculptor and graphic artist

text of Max Ernst's poem 'First Memorable Conversation with the Chimera', in the journal 'VVV', no. 1. New York, June 1942, p. 17
1936 - 1950

“p>Ye living lamps, by whose dear light
The nightingale does sit so late
And studying all the summer night
Her matchless songs does meditate;Ye country comets, that portend
No war, nor prince's funeral,
Shining unto no higher end
Than to presage the grasses's fall;Ye glow-worms whose officious flame
To wandering mowers shows the way,
That in the night have lost their aim
And after foolish fires do stray;Your courteous lights in vain you waste,
Since juliana here is come,
For she my mind hath so displaced
That I shall never find my home.”

Andrew Marvell (1621–1678) English metaphysical poet and politician

The Mover to the Glow-worms

War , Way , Home , Study

“Were I a nightingale, I would act the part of a nightingale; were I a swan, the part of a swan.”

Epictetus (50–138) philosopher from Ancient Greece

Book I, ch. 16.
Discourses

Parting

“"I'll never love any but you," the morning song of the lark;
"I'll never love any but you," the nightingale's hymn in the dark.”

Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809–1892) British poet laureate

The First Quarrel, stanza VI., lines 3-4; reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

Love

“Sarojini Naidu repositioned her own title of Nightingale of India on to Subbalakshmi’s avian frame, it was because that daughter of Bengal saw the gift of song arriving and alighting on this daughter of India’s south, like a migratory bird from the collective genius of our music.”

M. S. Subbulakshmi (1916–2004) singer,Carnatic vocalist

Gopal Gandhi in his book [Gandhi, Gopal, Of a Certain Age: Twenty Life Sketches, http://books.google.com/books?id=Inp4jPFUHUkC&pg=PA164, 2011, Penguin Books India, 978-0-670-08502-6, 166]
About M.S.

Music , Bird , Daughters

“Yet Ah, that Spring should vanish with the Rose!
That Youth's sweet-scented manuscript should close!
The Nightingale that in the branches sang,
Ah, whence, and whither flown again, who knows!”

Omar Khayyám (1048–1131) Persian poet, philosopher, mathematician, and astronomer

Source: The Rubaiyat (1120)

Youth , Spring