Quotes about owl (67 quotes) | Quotes of famous people

“We are not afraid of the owl, we are the hawks.”

Mehmed II (1432–1481) Ottoman sultan

Source: Aşıkpaşoğlu History (Prepared: Atsız), 79

“The clamorous owl, that nightly hoots and wonders
At out quaint spirits.”

William Shakespeare A Midsummer Night's Dream

Source: A Midsummer Night's Dream

“This, I say. This and this. The way his hair looked in summer sun. His face when he ran. His eyes, solemn as an owl at lessons. This and this and this. So many moments of happiness, crowding forward.”

Madeline Miller book The Song of Achilles

Source: The Song of Achilles

Way , Sun , Summer , Happiness

“She is our moon. Our tidal pull. She is the rich deep beneath the sea, the buried treasure, the expression in the owl's eye, the perfume in the wild rose. She is what the water says when it moves.”

Patricia A. McKillip Solstice Wood

Source: Solstice Wood

Water , Sea

“The owl of wisdom flies, as is well known, after sunset. Thus the theory of a "socialist" system of money and prices was developed only after twilight of inflationist illusions.”

Leon Trotsky book The Revolution Betrayed

Source: The Revolution Betrayed (1936), Ch. 4, Section 3 : The Rehabilitation of the Ruble

Wisdom , Money

“There was an Old Man with a beard,
Who said, "It is just as I feared!—
Two Owls and a Hen,
Four Larks and a Wren,
Have all built their nests in my beard!"”

Edward Lear (1812–1888) British artist, illustrator, author and poet

Book of Nonsense http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext97/nnsns10.txt, Limerick 1 (1846).

Fear

“Peyton Fahrquhar was dead; his body, with a broken neck, swung gently from side to side beneath the timbers of the Owl Creek bridge.”

Ambrose Bierce (1842–1914) American editorialist, journalist, short story writer, fabulist, and satirist

An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge (1891)

Dead

“The crow wished everything was black, the Owl, that everything was white.”

William Blake (1757–1827) English Romantic poet and artist

“Words should wander and meander. They should fly like owls and flicker like bats and slip like cats. They should murmur and scream and dance and sing.”

David Almond book My Name Is Mina

Source: My Name Is Mina

Cats , Singing , Dance , Flying

“If this were a made-up story, it would begin at night, with a storm blowing and owls hooting and rattling noises under the bed.”

Darren Shan book Cirque du Freak

Source: A Living Nightmare

Night

“While Eeyore frets…
… and Piglet hesitates
… and Rabbit calculates
… and Owl pontificates
… Pooh just is.”

Benjamin Hoff (1946) American writer

“So why am I depressed? That's the million-dollar question, baby, the Tootsie Roll question; not even the owl knows the answer to that one. I don't know either. All I know is the chronology.”

Ned Vizzini book It's Kind of a Funny Story

Source: It's Kind of a Funny Story

Question , Baby

“The owl of Minerva takes its flight only when the shades of night are gathering.”

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel book Elements of the Philosophy of Right

Preface xxx
Variant: When philosophy paints its grey on grey, then has a shape of life grown old. By philosophy's grey on grey it cannot be rejuvenated but only understood. The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk.
As translated by T. M. Knox, (1952) 
Source: Elements of the Philosophy of Right (1820/1821)
Context: Only one word more concerning the desire to teach the world what it ought to be. For such a purpose philosophy at least always comes too late. Philosophy, as the thought of the world, does not appear until reality has completed its formative process, and made itself ready. History thus corroborates the teaching of the conception that only in the maturity of reality does the ideal appear as counterpart to the real, apprehends the real world in its substance, and shapes it into an intellectual kingdom. When philosophy paints its grey in grey, one form of life has become old, and by means of grey it cannot be rejuvenated, but only known. The owl of Minerva takes its flight only when the shades of night are gathering.

Night

“They did not hear Grimble, as he lay dying, chant in the true voice of the Boreal Owl, in tones like chimes in the night, an ancient owl prayer”

Kathryn Lasky (1944) American children's writer

Source: The Capture

Night

“Jamie, I had found out by accident a few days previously, had never mastered the art of winking one eye. Instead, he blinked solemnly, like a large red owl.”

Diana Gabaldon book Outlander

Variant: That's not precisely what I had in mind."
Jamie, I had found out by accident a few days previously, had never mastered the art of winking one eye. Instead, he blinked solemnly, like a large red owl.
Source: Outlander

Art

“He respects owl, because you can't help respecting anybody who can spell TUESDAY, even if he doesn't spell it right.”

A.A. Milne (1882–1956) British author

Help

“And he respects Owl, because you can't help respecting anyone who can spell Tuesday, even if he doesn't spell it right; but spelling isn't everything. There are days when spelling Tuesday simply doesn't count.”

A.A. Milne book The House at Pooh Corner

Source: The House at Pooh Corner (1928), Chapter Five - Rabbit, speaking of Christopher Robin.

Help

“A legend, Kludd, is a story that you begin to feel in your gizzard and then over time it becomes true in your heart. And perhaps makes you become a better owl.”

Kathryn Lasky (1944) American children's writer

Source: The Capture

Feeling , Time , Heart

“Owls are wise. They are careful and patient. Wisdom precludes boldness. That is why owls make poor heroes.”

Patrick Rothfuss book The Name of the Wind

Source: The Name of the Wind

Wisdom

“The owl flies, in the moonlight, over a field where the wounded cry out.

Like the owl, I fly in the night over my own misfortune.”

Georges Bataille (1897–1962) French intellectual and literary figure

Source: The Impossible

Cry , Flying , Night

“We were restless for ages… After a while I heard an owl hooting and calmed myself by thinking of it flying over the dark fields – and then I remembered it would be pouncing on mice. I love owls, but I wish God had made them vegetarian.”

Dodie Smith book I Capture the Castle

Source: I Capture the Castle

Love , God , Age , Thinking

“If you are unwilling to defend your right to your own lives,
then you are merely like mice trying to argue with owls.
You think their ways are wrong.
They think you are dinner.”

Terry Goodkind book Naked Empire

Source: Naked Empire

Way , Thinking

“More like some small, fierce bird of prey, something with a sharp bite. An owl perhaps, that speaks only when the rest of the world sleeps.
Jenny will do well enough.”

Juliet Marillier book Daughter of the Forest

Source: Daughter of the Forest

World , Bird , Sleep

“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

Bird

“And if anyone knows anything about anything," said Bear to himself,
"it's Owl who knows something about something," he said, "or my name's not Winnie-the-Pooh," he said. "which it is," he added. "so there you are.”

A.A. Milne book Winnie-the-Pooh

Source: Winnie-the-Pooh

“I plead alignment to the flakes of the untitled snakes of a merry cow and to the republicrats for which they scam: one nacho, underpants with licorice and jugs of wine for owls.”

Matt Groening (1954) American cartoonist

Source: The Big Book of Hell

Wine

“Like some winter animal the moon licks the salt of your hand,
Yet still your hair foams violet as a lilac tree
From which a small wood-owl calls.”

Johannes Bobrowski (1917–1965) German author

Tree , Winter , Animals

“The owl goes not into the nest of the lark.”

Victor Hugo book The Hunchback of Notre Dame

Source: The Hunchback of Notre Dame

““It is terrible bad luck. Owls are often augurs of death, Mr. Flattery. There is no surer sign.”
“Not even the cessation of breathing?” the viscount asked, but neither Tristam nor Beacham laughed.”

Sean Russell (1952) author

Source: World Without End (1995), Chapter 39 (p. 557)

Death , Bad luck

“As when on some secluded branch in forest far and wide sits perched an owl, who, full of self-conceit and self-created wisdom, explains, comments, condemns, ordains and order things not understood, yet full of importance still holds forth to stocks and stones around — so sits and scribbles Mike.”

Michael Faraday (1791–1867) English scientist

Of himself and his writing abilities, as quoted in A Random Walk in Science (1973) by Robert L. Weber, p. 76

Wisdom

“Owl took Christopher Robin's notice from Rabbit and looked at it nervously. He could spell his own name WOL, and he could spell Tuesday so that you knew it wasn't Wednesday, and he could read quite comfortably when you weren't looking over his shoulder and saying "Well?"”

A.A. Milne book The House at Pooh Corner

all the time, and he could—
Source: The House at Pooh Corner (1928), Chapter Five.

Time , Reading

“Owl was telling Kanga an Interesting Anecdote full of long words like Encyclopædia and Rhododendron to which Kanga wasn't listening.”

A.A. Milne book Winnie-the-Pooh

Source: Winnie-the-Pooh (1926), Chapter Eight.

“In the life of the academic mind, the owl of Minerva seldom flies as early as the dusk.”

John Gray (1948) British philosopher

'Definition of the Political Thought of Tlön' (p.91)
Gray's Anatomy: Selected Writings (2009)

Life

“The French call such an anima figure a femme fatale. The sirens of the Greeks and the Lorelei of the Germans embody these dangerous aspects of the anima-in a word, destructive illusions. The following Siberian tale gives a particularly apt portrayal of such a destructive anima:
: A solitary hunter once had the experience of seeing a beautiful woman appear on the opposite bank of a river. She waved to him and sang, "Come, come. I've missed you, missed you. Now I want to put my arms around you, put my arms around you. Come, come, my nest is nearby, my nest. Come, come, lonely hunter, right now in the stillness of twilight." As he threw off his clothes and began swimming across to her, she suddenly flew away in the form of an owl, laughing mockingly. Swimming back, he drowned in the ice-cold river.
Here the anima symbolizes an unreal dream of love and happiness, of motherly love and security (the nest), an illusion that holds a man back from life. The hunter freezes to death because of his pursuit of an erotic fantasy.”

Marie-Louise von Franz (1915–1998) Swiss psychologist and scholar

Source: Archetypal Dimensions of the Psyche (1994), The Anima as the Woman within the Man, p. 311

Love , Life , Death , Beauty

“Night with all her negro train,
Took possession of the plain;
In an hearse she rode reclin'd.
Drawn by screech-owls slow and blind:
Close to her, with printless feet,
Crept Stillness in a winding sheet.”

Christopher Smart (1722–1771) English poet

Ode XIV. A Night-Piece; or, Modern Philosophy (1748).

Training , Night

“Understanding is always in some sense retrospective, which is what Hegel meant by remarking that the owl of Minerva flies only at night.”

Terry Eagleton (1943) British writer, academic and educator

Afterword, p. 190
1980s, Literary Theory: An Introduction (1983)

Understanding , Sense , Night

“I will neither resurrect the past nor return.
Sleep, Romeo, Juliet, on your headrest of stone feathers.
I won't raise your bound hands from the ashes.
Let the cat visit the deserted cathedrals,
its pupil flashing on the altars. Let an owl
nest on the dead ogive.”

Czeslaw Milosz (1911–2004) Polish, poet, diplomat, prosaist, writer, and translator

"Farewell" (1945), trans. Renata Gorczynski and Robert Hass
Rescue (1945)

Cats , Sleep , Past , Dead

“Gylfie turned to Digger and spoke, "Come with us, Digger."
"But where is it you're going?" he asked.
"To the Great Ga'Hoole Tree."
"What?" said Digger, but before Twilight could answer, Streak broke in. "I've heard of that place, but isn't it just a story, a legend?"
"To some it might be," Twilight said, and blinked at the eagle.
But not to owls, thought Soren. To owls, he thought, it is a real place.”

Kathryn Lasky (1944) American children's writer

Source: The Capture (2003), Chapter Twenty-seven: "Horten se's Eagles", pp. 215–216

Tree

“Save that from yonder ivy-mantled tow'r
The moping owl does to the moon complain.”

Thomas Gray (1716–1771) English poet, historian

St. 3
Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard http://www.thomasgray.org/cgi-bin/display.cgi?text=elcc (written 1750, publ. 1751)

“Ophelia is a little walking owl, bewitched by her unconscious feminine, her father, and what "they say." She never finds her own voice. She never finds her own body or her own feelings and therefore misses life and love in the here and now. Gradually the waters of the unconscious to which she is "native and indued" swallow her.”

Marion Woodman (1928–2018) Canadian writer

Source: The Owl Was a Baker's Daughter (1980), p. 9

Love , Life , Feeling , Water

“[After discovering Soren's former home is abandoned] Then Twilight spoke, "Soren, they're gone. Maybe something happened to them. You shouldn't take it personally. Buck up now, old buddy."
"Personally? What do you know, Twilight, that is personal about any family? You've never had a family. Remember, you're always telling us about how much you learned in your own orphan school of tough learning. You don't know the feel of a mother's down. You don't know what it's like to hear stories from a father, or to hear him sing. Do you know what a psalm is, Twilight? I bet you don't. Well, we Barn Owls know about psalms and books and the feeling of down."
Twilight's feathers had ruffled up, spiky with ice crystals. He looked fearsome. "I'll tell you what I know, you miserable little owl. The whole world is my family. I know the softness of a fox's fur, and the strange green light that comes into their eyes during the spring moons. I know how to fish because I learned from an eagle. And when meat is scarce I know how to find the ripest part of a rotten tree and peck the juiciest bugs from it. I know plenty."”

Kathryn Lasky (1944) American children's writer

Source: The Capture (2003), Chapter Twenty-four: "Empty Hollows", p. 181

Books , World , School , Family

“Just then, with a wink and a sly normal lurch,
The owl very gravely got down from his perch,
Walked round, and regarded his fault-finding critic
(Who thought he was stuffed) with a glance analytic.”

James Thomas Fields (1817–1881) American writer and publisher

The Owl-Critic, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).

“In eras when authority or at least specific authorities have been questioned, there is more tendency to examine the roots of and the need for authority. The owl of Minerva flies not in the dusk but in the storm.”

Kenneth Arrow (1921–2017) American economist

Source: 1970s-1980s, The Limits Of Organization (1974), Chapter 4, Authority And Responsibility, p. 65

Question

“When you begin to read a poem you are entering a foreign country whose laws and language and life are a kind of translation of your own; but to accept it because its stews taste exactly like your old mother's hash, or to reject it because the owl-headed goddess of wisdom in its temple is fatter than the Statue of Liberty, is an equal mark of that want of imagination, that inaccessibility to experience, of which each of us who dies a natural death will die.”

Randall Jarrell (1914–1965) poet, critic, novelist, essayist

"The Obscurity of the Poet," Harvard University lecture (15 August 1950) delivered at the Harvard University Summer School Conference on the Defense of Poetry (August 14-17, 1950); reprinted in Partisan Review, XVIII (January/February 1951) and published in Poetry and the Age (1953)
General sources
Variant: When you begin to read a poem you are entering a foreign country whose laws and language and life are a kind of translation of your own; but to accept it because its stews taste exactly like your old mother's hash, or to reject it because the owl-headed goddess of wisdom in its temple is fatter than the Statue of Liberty, is an equal mark of that want of imagination, that inaccessibility to experience, of which each of us who dies a natural death will die.

Life , Death , Wisdom , Law

“St. Agnes’ Eve — Ah, bitter chill it was!
The owl, for all his feathers, was a-cold;
The hare limp’d trembling through the frozen grass,
And silent was the flock in woolly fold.”

John Keats The Eve of St. Agnes

Stanza 1
Poems (1820), The Eve of St. Agnes

Grass

““Pascal’s Wager never appealed to me. It seems logically… shallow.”
“Perhaps because it posits only two choices,” said Aenea. Somewhere in the desert night, an owl made a short, sharp sound. “Spiritual resurrection and immortality or death and damnation,” she said.
“Those last two aren’t the same thing,” I said.
“No, but perhaps to someone like Blaise Pascal they were. Someone terrified of ‘the eternal silence of these infinite spaces.’”
“A spiritual agoraphobic,” I said.
Aenea laughed. The sound was so sincere and spontaneous that I could not help loving it. Her.
“Religion seems to have always offered that false duality,” she said, setting her cup of tea on a flat stone. “The silences of infinite space or the cozy comfort of inner certainty.””

Dan Simmons book The Rise of Endymion

Source: The Rise of Endymion (1997), Chapter 10 (p. 166)

Love , Death , Religion , Silence

“Do you think I was born in a wood to be afraid of an owl?”

Jonathan Swift (1667–1745) Anglo-Irish satirist, essayist, and poet

Polite Conversation (1738), Dialogue 1

Thinking

“Once upon a very long time ago, in the time of Glaux, there was an order of knightly owls, from a kingdom called Ga'Hoole, who would rise up each night and perform noble deeds. They spoke no words but true ones, their purpose was to right all wrongs, to make strong the weak, mend the broken, vanquish the proud, and make powerless those who abused the frail. With hearts sublime they would take flight…”

Kathryn Lasky (1944) American children's writer

Noctus, Kludd's father, telling a legend of Ga'Hoole, repeated throughout the series; Chapter One: "A Nest Remembered", p. 14
The Capture (2003)

Strong , Time , Heart , Night

“These notices had been written by Christopher Robin, who was the only one in the forest who could spell; for Owl, wise though he was in many ways, able to read and write and spell his own name WOL, yet somehow went all to pieces over delicate words like MEASLES and BUTTEREDTOAST.”

A.A. Milne book Winnie-the-Pooh

Source: Winnie-the-Pooh (1926), Chapter Four.

Way , Reading

“In the dreams of the villagers a huge bear, a mythical apparition from the fading past, restored like Phoenix, walked around powerfully. Standing on her hind legs, moving towards them proudly, roaring with rage, and the horrified villagers, who could not fire in their dreams and could not even find their own voices, would open their eyes, bathed in sweat and would listen, listen in terror for the nocturnal screeches of eagle-owls scratching the darkness of the Cherith gorge, like meteors, disturbing and trembling.”

Miho Mosulishvili book A Big She-Bear

Source: A Big She-Bear (2013), p. 11

Dreams , Rage , Past

“Why is it that one can look at a lion or a planet or an owl or at someone’s finger as long as one pleases, but looking into the eyes of another person is, if prolonged past a second, a perilous affair?”

Walker Percy (1916–1990) Southern philosophical novelist

Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book (1983)

Past , Personality

“Like sending owls to Athens, as the proverb goes.”

Diogenes Laërtius (180–240) biographer of ancient Greek philosophers

Plato, 32.
The Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers (c. 200 A.D.), Book 3: Plato

“The ancient owls' nest must have burned.
Hastily, all alone,
a glistening armadillo left the scene,
rose-flecked, head down, tail down”

Elizabeth Bishop (1911–1979) American poet

Poem: The Armadillo http://unix.cc.wmich.edu/~cooneys/poems/bishop.armadillo.html

“Gylfie felt that the moment was right. "You are the last owl in the world that I would ever say lacked humility, 12-8. You are for my friend and myself a perfect example of humility. You are beyond humbleness! You are…" Gylfie was madly searching for a word. What's she going to say next? Soren couldn't imagine. He had never seen such a demonstration of outrageous fawning. "You are subglaucious." 12-8 blinked at the word as did Soren, who had no idea what subglaucious meant. "We, my friend and I, only wish that we could serve in the eggorium and thus attain such humbleness as yourself."
"Your words are kind, 25-2. I shall hope that they might encourage me in my continuing quest for humility while in service to a great cause." She wandered off looking a tad more moon blinked than before, if that was possible.
"What in Glaux's name is subglaucious?" Soran said as soon as she was out of earshot.
"No idea. I made it up."”

Kathryn Lasky (1944) American children's writer

Source: The Capture (2003), Chapter Thirteen: "Perfection!", pp. 102–103

World , Hope , Imagination , Search

“"I’m an owl; you’re another. Sir Critic, good day."
And the barber kept on shaving.”

James Thomas Fields (1817–1881) American writer and publisher

The Owl-Critic, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).

“Our post-Hannah Arendt imaginations are haunted by the wrong figure: for every owl-eyed, mild-mannered pen-pusher clinically shuffling the euphemistic paperwork of oblivion, there were a hundred noisily dedicated louts revelling in the bloodbath. The gas chambers, our most enduring symbol of the catastrophe, were in fact anomalous: most of those annihilated did not die suddenly and surprised as the result of a deception, but only after protracted humiliations and torments to whose devising their persecutors devoted inexhaustible creative zeal.”

Clive James (1939–2019) Australian author, critic, broadcaster, poet, translator and memoirist

'Hitler's Unwitting Exculpator', a review of Hitler's Willing Executioners by Daniel Jonah Goldhagen
Essays and reviews, As Of This Writing (2003)

Imagination

“Drink, my jolly lads, drink with discerning,
Wedlock's a lane where there is no turning;
Never was owl more blind than a lover,
Drink and be merry, lads, half seas over.”

Dinah Craik (1826–1887) English novelist and poet

"Magnus and Morna", in Thirty Years, Poems New and Old (1880)

Lovers , Drink , Sea

“He was in LOGIC a great critic,
Profoundly skill'd in analytic;
He could distinguish, and divide
A hair 'twixt south, and south-west side:
On either which he would dispute,
Confute, change hands, and still confute,
He'd undertake to prove, by force
Of argument, a man's no horse;
He'd prove a buzzard is no fowl,
And that a lord may be an owl,
A calf an alderman, a goose a justice,
And rooks Committee-men and Trustees.”

Samuel Butler (poet) (1612–1680) poet and satirist

Canto I, line 65
Source: Hudibras, Part I (1663–1664)

Men , Justice , Change , Horse

“When we asked Pooh what the opposite of an Introduction was, he said "The what of a what?" which didn't help us as much as we had hoped, but luckily Owl kept his head and told us that the Opposite of an Introduction, my dear Pooh, was a Contradiction; and, as he is very good at long words, I am sure that that's what it is.”

A.A. Milne book The House at Pooh Corner

Contradiction.
The House at Pooh Corner (1928)

Hope , Help

“Philosophy is not the owl of Minerva that takes flight after history has been realized in order to celebrate its happy ending; rather, philosophy is subjective proposition, desire, and praxis that are applied to the event.”

Antonio Negri book Empire

49
Empire

History , Happiness

“Sometimes the duck is tormented in a different manner, without the assistance of the dogs; by having an owl tied upon her back, and so put into the water, where she frequently dives in order to escape from the burden, and on her return for air, the miserable owl, half drowned, shakes itself, and hooting, frightens the duck; she of course dives again, and replunges the owl into the water; the frequent repetition of this action soon deprives the poor bird of its sensation, and generally ends in its death, if not in that of the duck also.”

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

pg. 285
The Sports and Pastimes of the People of England (1801), Public entertainment

Death , Dogs , Bird , Water

“When a person hasn’t in him that which is higher and stronger than all external influences, it is enough for him to catch a good cold in order to lose his equilibrium and begin to see an owl in every bird, to hear a dog’s bark in every sound.”

Anton Chekhov (1860–1904) Russian dramatist, author and physician

A Dreary Story or A Tedious Story (1889)

Dogs , Bird , Personality

“Many indeed are the owls who know no song unlike their own hooting.”

Khalil Gibran book Jesus, The Son of Man

Jesus, The Son of Man (1928)
Context: Many are the fools who say that Jesus stood in His own path and opposed Himself; that He knew not His own mind, and in the absence of that knowledge confounded Himself.
Many indeed are the owls who know no song unlike their own hooting.
You and I know the jugglers of words who would honor only a greater juggler, men who carry their heads in baskets to the market-place and sell them to the first bidder.
We know the pygmies who abuse the sky-man. And we know what the weed would say of the oak tree and the cedar.
I pity them that they cannot rise to the heights.

Nicodemus The Poet, The Youngest Of The Elders In The Sanhedrim: On Fools And Jugglers

“Though in Bengal and Orissa, some say, Alakshmi is visualized as an owl seated beside Lakshmi, Alakshmi is a secret goddess, invisible to all. The only way to see her is to have Saraswati, goddess of knowledge and good sense by your side. But Lakshmi will never let Saraswati stay in the same house as her. She will go wherever there is Saraswati and kick her out, making room for Alakshmi. Why does she do that, one wonders. But then one is told that Lakshmi is a whimsical goddess, she does not like to stay in one place too long. By kicking Saraswati out and by getting Alakshmi in, she ensures there is a fight in the house and when there is a fight, wealth invariably moves out of a house.”

Devdutt Pattanaik (1970) Indian physician; leadership consultant, mythologist and author

Devdutt Pattanaik in: The Rise of Alakshmi http://devdutt.com/articles/modern-mythmaking/the-rise-of-alakshmi.html, Speaking Tree, The Times of India, 2 May 2010, Retrieved 7 September 2017

Housing , Wealth , Fight , Knowledge

“It is terrible bad luck. Owls are often augurs of death, Mr. Flattery. There is no surer sign.”

Sean Russell (1952) author

“Not even the cessation of breathing?” the viscount asked, but neither Tristam nor Beacham laughed.
Source: World Without End (1995), Chapter 39 (p. 557)

Bad luck , Death

“It [an owl] is like coming from a fairy-tale, something royal fragile, something that you would never want to touch, Yes to me it has become fully absolute because of that silver breast.”

Jan Mankes (1889–1920) Dutch painter

translation from original Dutch: Fons Heijnsbroek

(original Dutch: citaat van Jan Mankes, in het Nederlands:) Het [de uil] is net een verschijning uit een sprookje, iets koninklijk teers, iets waar je nooit aan zou willen raken, ja hij is voor mij door die zilveren borst totaal volmaakt geworden.

Quote of Jan Mankes, c. 1911 in a letter to his maceneas A.A.M. Pauwels in The Hague; as cited on the website of museum more in Gorssel https://www.museummore.nl/nu-te-zien/jan-mankes/

The owl was a present of his maceneas Pauwels who sent it to him and lived in his home. Mankes painted it in a. o. his 'Selfportrait with Owl', 1911 https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/01/Self_portrait_with_owl%2C_by_Jan_Mankes.jpg
1909 - 1914

“The owl of Minerva only flies abroad when the shades of night are gathering.”

Denis Healey (1917–2015) British Labour Party politician and Life peer

Source: 'The Owl and the Bulldog: Reflections on Conservatism and Foreign Policy', Twentieth Century, Volume 155 (1954), p. 107
Context: Speaking for Conservatism, Hegel was right. And nothing proves it better than the post-war crop of Tory intellectuals, sprouting like mushrooms in the damp cellars of Abbey House. Not until the stimuli which originally conditioned Conservative reflexes have finally disappeared can the intellectual emerge to provide a rationale for Conservative behaviour. So Conservative theory must always base itself on some form of historical restorationism. The moderate seeks the world of Joseph Chamberlain—or if he is daring, of Disraeli. The really advanced radical looks still further back, to Prince Rupert, or the Middle Ages, particularly if he is a Catholic.

Night