Eagles
From Wikiquote
Eagles are large birds of prey which mainly inhabit Eurasia and Africa, with a few species in the Americas and Australia. The eagle has been used by many nations as a national symbol, depicting power, beauty and independence, and is also a sacred or religious symbol in many cultures.
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- He clasps the crag with crooked hands;
Close to the sun in lonely lands,
Ring'd with the azure world, he stands.
The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls;
He watches from his mountain walls,
And like a thunderbolt he falls.- Alfred Tennyson, "The Eagle" (1851).
- The eagle suffers little birds to sing.
- William Shakespeare, Titus Andronicus, Act iv, scene 4.
- And there is a Catskill eagle in some souls that can alike dive down into the blackest gorges, and soar out of them again and become invisible in the sunny spaces. And even if he for ever flies within the gorge, that gorge is in the mountains; so that even in his lowest swoop the mountain eagle is still higher than other birds upon the plain, even though they soar.
- Herman Melville, Moby-Dick (1851), "The Try-Works".
- The chief is the chief. He is the eagle who flies high and cannot be touched by the spit of the toad.
- Mobutu Sésé Seko, October 1991, in Martin Meredith, The Fate of Africa, p. 525.
- And thus among these rocks he lived,
Through summer heat and winter snow:
The Eagle, he was lord above,
And Rob was lord below.- William Wordsworth, Rob Roy's Grave.
- Whether it be the sweeping eagle in his flight, or the open apple-blossom, the toiling work-horse, the blithe swan, the branching oak, the winding stream at its base, the drifting clouds, over all the coursing sun, form ever follows function, and this is the law. Where function does not change form does not change.
- Louis Sullivan, "The tall office building artistically considered" in Lippincott's Magazine (March 1896).
- Fate is not an eagle, it creeps like a rat.
- Elizabeth Bowen, The House in Paris (1935).
- I wish the Bald Eagle had not been chosen as the representative of our country; he is a bird of bad moral character; like those among men who live by sharking and robbing, he is generally poor, and often very lousy. The turkey is a much more respectable bird.
- Benjamin Franklin, letter to Sarah Bache (January 26, 1784).
- Yet spirit immortal, the tomb can not bind thee,
But like thine own eagle that soars to the sun
Thou springest from bondage and leavest behind thee
A name which before thee no mortal hath won.- Lyman Heath, The Grave of Bonaparte.
[edit] The eagle shot with an eagle-feather arrow
- The haft of the arrow had been feathered with one of the eagle's own plumes.
We often give our enemies the means of our own destruction.- Aesop, The Eagle and the Arrow.
- So in the Libyan fable it is told
That once an eagle, stricken with a dart,
Said, when he saw the fashion of the shaft,
"With our own feathers, not by others' hands,
Are we now smitten."- Aeschylus, Fragm. 123 (Plumptre's Translation).
- So the struck eagle, stretch'd upon the plain,
No more through rolling clouds to soar again,
View'd his own feather on the fatal dart,
And wing'd the shaft that quiver'd in his heart.- Lord Byron, English Bards and Scotch Reviewers (1809), line 826.
- Like a young eagle, who has lent his plume
To fledge the shaft by which he meets his doom,
See their own feathers pluck'd to wing the dart
Which rank corruption destines for their heart.- Thomas Moore, Corruption.
- That eagle's fate and mine are one,
Which on the shaft that made him die
Espied a feather of his own,
Wherewith he wont to soar so high.- Edmund Waller, To a Lady singing a Song of his Composing.
- Let them make their war.
Whence come night and day?
Whence will the eagle become gray?
Whence is it that night is dark?
Whence is it that the linnet is green?
The ebullition of the sea,
How is it not seen?- Taliesin, The First Address of Taliesin, Priv Cyfarch as translated by W. F. Skene (1858).
