GREAT AVIATION QUOTES
Richard Bach


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There are 23 quotes matching Richard Bach in the collection:



Real flight, my friend taught me, is the spirit of an airplane lifting the spirit of its pilot into the high clean blue of the sky, where they join to share the freedom.

Richard Bach

In the first article he ever had published, an unsolicated submission to Air Facts magazine they bought for $25. “My friend” was an Air Force T-33 jet trainer. Voice in the Dark, Air Facts magazine, September 1960.

Air Facts Sep 1960

My airplane is quiet, and for a moment still an alien, still a stranger to the ground, I am home.

Richard Bach

Stranger to the Ground, 1963.

Stranger to the Ground

The airplane is just a bunch of sticks and wires and cloth, a tool for learning about the sky and about what kind of person I am, when I fly. An airplane stands for freedom, for joy, for the power to understand, and to demonstrate that understanding. Those things aren’t destructable.

Richard Bach

Nothing by Chance, 1963.

Never stop being a kid. Never stop feeling and seeing and being excited with great things like air and engines and sounds of sunlight within you. Wear your little mask if you must to protect you from the world but if you let that kid disappear you are grown up and you are dead.

Richard Bach

Nothing by Chance, 1963.

I belong to a group of men who fly alone. There is only one seat in the cockpit of a fighter airplane. There is no space alotted for another pilot to tune the radios in the weather or make the calls to air traffic control centers or to help with the emergency procedures or to call off the airspeed down final approach. There is no one else to break the solitude of a long cross-country flight. There is no one else to make decisions.
I do everything myself, from engine start to engine shutdown. In a war, I will face alone the missiles and the flak and the small-arms fire over the front lines.

If I die, I will die alone.

Richard Bach

Stranger to the Ground, 1963.

I’ve learned that it is what I do not know that I fear, and I strive, outwardly from pride, inwardly from the knowledge that the unknown is what will finally kill me, to know all there is to be known about my airplane. I will never die.

Richard Bach

Stranger to the Ground, 1963.

The man who flies an airplane, then, to be the best possible pilot, must be a believer in the unseen.

Richard Bach

Biplane, 1966.

For pilots sometimes see behind the curtain, behind the veil of gossamer velvet, and find the truth behind man, the force behind a universe.

Richard Bach

Biplane, 1966.

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.

Most gulls don’t bother to learn more than the simplest facts of flight — how to get from shore to food and back again. For most gulls, it is not flying that matters, but eating. For this gull, though, it was not eating that mattered, but flight. More than anything else, Jonathan Livingston Seagull loved to fly.

Richard Bach

Jonathan Livingston Seagull, 1970.

For this gull, though, it was not eating that mattered, but flight. More than anything else, Jonathan Livingston Seagull loved to fly.

Instead of our drab slogging forth and back to the fishing boats, there's a reason to life! We can lift ourselves out of ignorance, we can find ourselves as creatures of excellence and intelligence and skill. We can be free! We can learn to fly!

Richard Bach

Jonathan Livingston Seagull, 1970.

You will begin to touch heaven, Jonathan, in the moment you touch the perfect speed. And that isn’t flying a thousand miles an hour, or a million, of flying at the speed of light. Because any number is a limit, and perfect speed, my son, is being there.

Richard Bach

Jonathan Livingston Seagull, 1970.

Jonathan Livingston Seagull book

To fly as fast as thought, to anywhere that is, you must begin by knowing that you have already arrived.

Richard Bach

Jonathan Livingston Seagull, 1970.

Flyers fell a certain kinship with the sight of the earth unencrusted by humanity, they want to see it that way in one sweeping view, in reassurance that nature still exists on her own, without a chain-link fence to hold her.

Richard Bach

A Gift Of Wings, 1974.

We thought humble and proud at the same time, all at once in love again with this painful bittersweet lovely thing called flight.

Richard Bach

A Gift of Wings, 1974

Flying prevails whenever a man and his airplane are put to a test of maximum performance.

Richard Bach

A Gift of Wings, 1974

Why fly? Simple. I’m not happy unless there's some room between me and the ground.

Richard Bach

A Gift of Wings, 1974.

Flyers have a sense of adventures yet to come, instead of dimly recalling adventures of long ago as the only moments in which they truly lived.

Richard Bach

A Gift of Wings, 1974.

The highest art form of all is a human being in control of himself and his airplane in flight, urging the spirit of a machine to match his own.

Richard Bach

A Gift Of Wings, 1974.

He moves not through distance, but through the ranges of satisfaction that come from hauling himself up into the air with complete and utter control; from knowing himself and knowing his airplane so well that he can come somewhere close to touching, in his own special and solitary way, that thing that is called perfection.

Richard Bach

A Gift of Wings, 1974.


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