GREAT AVIATION QUOTES

Newest avquote:

The art of flying is to perfect the interplay of inertial and gravitational masses.

Claudia de Rham, Professor of Theoretical Physics at Imperial College. A perfect description of flying — from the viewpoint of a physicist working at the interface of gravity, cosmology, and particle physics. She is also a pilot. In her wonderful 2024 book on the physics of gravity, The Beauty of Falling.

In a 2018 interview, she said: “I would have all these ideas in my mind, all these problems, but when you fly you have to focus on something very different. It clears your mind, and all these new connections get created, and you come up with new ideas.”

Newest old quote added to the collection:

If anyone tries to tell you something about an aeroplane which is so damn complicated that you can’t understand it, you can take it from me it’s all balls.

R. J. Mitchell, aeronautical engineer and designer of the Spitfire, told to test pilot Jeffrey Quill in the 1930’s. Quoted in his 1983 book Spitfire: A Test Pilot's Story.

Best new addition to the collection:

I have flown everything from a 65hp Piper J-3 Cub to all the USAF Century Series fighters. But there is still something about being in the back seat of a yellow J-3 Cub with the door open on a glass smooth early morning just after sunrise with the slipstream hitting you in the face and Mother Earth slowly — I mean slowly — passing a couple of hundred feet below.

Dick Rutan, Voyager world flight pilot, quoted in the 2013 book The Little Book of Aviation.

The most misquoted avquote?

When once you have tasted flight, you will forever walk the earth with your eyes turned skyward, for there you have been, and there you will always long to return.

Wrongly attributed to Leonardo da Vinci.

This may be one of the most famous aviation quotes — but it wasn’t Leonardo! It’s attributed everywhere to him (including some Smithsonian publications, the Washington Post newspaper and a couple of science quotation books), but he never said or wrote it. For the full story on who did, see my August 2020 article in Air Facts magazine The Famous Quote That Da Vinci Never Said.

He did, however, pen this one about flying and writing:

Feathers shall raise men even as they do birds, towards heaven; that is by letters written with their quills.

Leonardo da Vinci
The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci: Arranged, Rendered into English and Introduced by Edward MacCurdy, 1938.

The object here is to capture man’s first-hand experiences with flight in all its forms, to collect and document our spoken and written words about aviation. It’s the ultimate online quotable flyer. It is not ‘under construction’, but it very much is a ‘work in progress’. If you can supply dates or sources for existing quotes, or correct my typos, or suggest further sources of quotations, or of course if you see some cool new quotes, please please send them in to me.

Always happy to add new sections, and to correct mistakes. This collection is growing into something no one person could have created, a real product of the worldwide aviation community.

I started the site in 1996 using Netscape Navigator 3.0 Gold and hand-coded HTML in MS notepad. This was back when AOL was king and before Google even existed! Internet Archive has screenshots from 1997. It was featured in the LA Times (17 December 1996) and USA Today (17 April 1997) newspapers. Been a few changes over the years, got a grown-up URL, and now it’s made using fancy Dreamweaver software running on a Mac.

Back then research meant college liberies and their dusty card indexes. Now with wholesale scanning and digitalization of old books and magazines, finding the exact original source of a quotation is finally possible. Lots of corrections made over the years to the sometimes third-hand quotes I first found reading flying books in the late 80’s.

The collection has been cited in several academic papers, been used as a resource for many books and movies, discussed on podcasts, and was even liked by Chuck Yeager. Now spreading wings on Pinterest and Instagram. It’s pretty neat that I’ve been able to share so many sky treasures, from the ‘special section on private bookshelves’:

Thousands of volumes have been written about aviation, but we do not automatically have thousands of true and special friends in their authors. That rare writer who comes alive on a page does it by giving of himself, by writing of meanings, and not just of fact or of things that have happened to him. The writers of flight who have done this are usually found together in a special section on private bookshelves.

Richard Bach
The Pleasure of Their Company, in Flying magazine, April 1968.

Airmanship is remarkable in that respect. There is something about it that shows almost immediately in the way a man behaves with airplanes; even in the way he merely talks about them at dinner. It shows in magazine articles; you often feel you can guess the exact number of hours the author has had, if any.

Wolfgang Langewiesche
I’ll Take the High Road, 1939.

Or like a poet woo the Moon,
Riding an armchair for my steed,
And with a flashing pen harpoon
Terrific metaphors of speed.

Roy Campbell
The Festivals of Flight, 1930.

I wish I could write well enough to write about aircraft. Falkner did it very well in Pylon but you cannot do something some one else has done though you might have done it if they hadn’t.

Ernest Hemingway
Letter to Harvey Breit, 3 July 1956.

It isn’t often that a writer of superlative skills knows enough about flying to write well about it.

Samuel Hynes
A Teller of Tales Tells His Own, in The New York Times, 7 September 1997.