GREAT AVIATION QUOTES
Cecil Lewis


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There are 5 quotes matching Cecil Lewis in the collection:


We who fly do so for the love of flying. We are alive in the air with this miracle that lies in our hands and beneath our feet. The pleasure of just getting up off the ground, getting into the air, getting our machine working, listening to the engine. Whatever it might be, you are master of it. You can take it up, bring it down, roll it, loop it, and all yourself. It’s terrific egoism. You can’t get that feeling in anything else, that feeling of leaving the earth, of going to heaven and really lifting yourself up off this flat dish of earth into the three dimensions of God.

Cecil Lewis

Taped comments as President of the Tiger Moth Club at their annual dinner that he was unable to attend due to age. Quoted in his obituary, The Independant newspaper, 29 January 1997.

Flying alone! Nothing gives such a sense of mastery over mechanism, mastery indeed over space, time, and life itself, as this.

Cecil Lewis

Sagittarius Rising, 1936.

And should I not, had I but known, have flung the machine this way and that, once more to feel it live under my hand, have sported in the sky and laughed and sung, knowing that never after should I feel so free, so sure in hazard, so secure, riding the daylight in the pride of youth? No more horizons wider than Hope! No more the franchise of the sky, the freedom of the blue! No more! Farewell to wings! Down to the little earth!

That distant day had a significance I could not give it then. So we wheeled and came back south towards the city. The Temple of Heaven slipped by underneath, that perfect pattern in its ample park. Then the wide plain ruled to the far horizon. Soon the aerodrome.

Now shut the engines off. Come down and flatten out, feel the long float, and at the given moment pull the stick right home. She's down. Now taxi in. Switch off. It’s over - but not quite, for the port engine, just as if it knew, as if reluctant at the last to let me go, kicked, kicked, and kicked again, as overheated engines will, then backfired with an angry snorting: Fool! The best is over … But I did not hear.

Cecil Lewis

Regards flying for the last time a Vickers Vimy over Peking in 1921. Sagittarius Rising, 1936.

You should live gloriously, generously, dangerously. Safety last!

Cecil Lewis

Sagittarius Rising, 1936.

Sagittarius Rising

So let us raise a cheer … for the insatiable spirit of Man eager for all new things! What a tale could have been written by that far off man who first saw a tree trunk roll and made a wheel and cart and harnessed in his mare and cracked his whip and drove away to disappear beyond the hill! Or that first man who made a boat and raised a sail and disappeared hull down to unknown shores!

All this is misty in a distant past. The land and sea are long since named and mapped and parcelled out. Only the air and all beyond, the greatest mystery of all, was still unmastered and unknown when I was young. Now we have learned to shuffle about the house and even plan to visit the neighbours. A million starry mansions wink at us as if they knew our hopes and beckon us abroud. All that I shall not see. But at the start, the little lost beginning, I can say of one small part of it: “Here is a witness from my heart and hand and eye of how it was!

Cecil Lewis

New 1965 preface for Sagittarius Rising. .


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