177 High Flying Quotes by Richard Bach

True love stories never have endings.

If our friendship depends on things like space and time, we have destroyed our own brotherhood.

You are not the child of the people you call mother and father, but their fellow-adventurer on a bright journey to understand the things that are.

Your friends will know you better in the first minute you meet than your acquaintances will know you in a thousand years.

The simplest things are often the truest.

Happiness is the reward we get for living to the highest right we know.

Every gift from a friend is a wish for your happiness.

The mark of your ignorance is the depth of your belief in injustice and tragedy. What the caterpillar calls the end of the world, the Master calls the butterfly.

You have the freedom to be yourself, your true self, here and now, and nothing can stand in your way.

A farewell is necessary before we can meet again, and meeting again after moments or a lifetime is certain for those who are friends.

The opposite of loneliness is not togetherness, it's intimacy.

Our soulmate is someone who shares our deepest longings, our sense of direction. When we're two balloons, and together our direction is up, chances are we've found the right person.

That's what learning is, after all; not whether we lose the game,
but how we lose and how we've changed because of it and what we take away from it that we never had before, to apply to other games. Losing, in a curious way, is winning.

Seagulls, as you know, never falter, never stall. To stall in the air is for them disgrace and it is dishonor.

I must fly home to the Flock and be content as I am, as a poor limited seagull.

There is something to astrology for those who believe in astrology, as there is something to medicine for those who believe in medicine. Every system works when we give our heart to it.

There are grand rewards for those who pick the high hard roads, but those rewards are hidden by years.

Our disasters have been some of the best things that ever happened to us. And what we swore were blessings have been some of the worst.

Any powerful idea is absolutely fascinating and absolutely useless until we choose to use it.

Not being known doesn't stop the truth from being true.

When you dream, all the scenery, characters, events, perils, and outcomes are built from your own consciousness, the darks and oppressions as well as the delights. Same with the world awake, though it takes you longer to build it.

As long as we believe in sequential time, we see becoming instead of being. Beyond time, we are all one.

Believe you know all the answers, and you know all the answers. Believe you're a master, and you are.

That she won the game startled me cold. The way she won, the pattern of her thought on the chessboard, charmed me warm again and then some.

Nobody comes to Earth to dodge problems. We come here to take 'em on.

You are free to smile in the midst of massive tests and challenges, knowing that you have chosen to play this game, and that you have dominion over all the appearances of earth.

It wasn't long before Jonathan Gull was off by himself again, far out at sea, hungry, happy, learning.

Two thousand years ago, five thousand, they didn't have a word for imagination, and faith was the best they could come up with for a pretty solemn bunch of followers.

The big thing about writing is three commands: Have fun. Don't think. Don't care.

You're always free to change your mind
and choose a different future, or a different past.

I think there's an invisible principle of living too. If we believe we're guided through every step of our lives, we are. It's a lovely sight, watching it work.

A Name Is A Label, And As Soon As There Is A Label, The Ideas Disappear And Out Comes Label-Worship And Label-Bashing, And Instead Of Living By A Theme Of Ideas, People Begin Dying For Labels... And The Last Thing The World Needs Is Another Religion.

If we want to end this lifetime higher than we began, we can expect an uphill road.

Thought plus belief equals manifestation.

Navigate by the same star, unwilling to change, and you find yourself not only off-course but lost.

When we come to the last moment of this lifetime and we look back across it, the only thing that's going to matter is 'What is the quality of our love?'

There is no such thing as a problem without a gift.

How can we resent the life we've created for ourselves?

One challenge of our adventure on earth is to rise above dead systems...wars, nations, destructions...to refuse to be a part of them, and express the highest selves we know how to be.

And behind it lies not blind chance but a principle that works to help us understand, a thousand coincidences and friends come to show us the way when the problem seems too hard to solve alone. Problems for overcoming. Freedom for proving. And, as long as we believe in our dream, nothing by chance.

Do you ever have the feeling you're a tourist on earth?

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

What a delighted fascination it is, to stand aside and watch our dearest friend perform on stage without us.

Individuals somehow are led to find my books at times that are important to them. The mail that I get very, very often will say, I was at a difficult time in my life, and someone gave me a copy.

Fear not, nor be dismayed at the appearance that is darkness, at the disguise that is evil, at the empty cloak that is death, for you have picked these for your challenges. They are stones on which you choose to whet the keen edge of your spirit.

Choose a love and work to make it true, and somehow, something will happen, something you couldn't plan, will come along to move like to like, to set you loose, to set you on the way to your next brick wall.

Everything is exactly as it is for a reason. The crumb on your table is no mystical reminder of this morning's cookie, it is there because you have chosen not to remove it. No exceptions.

I think the source of our sorrow and the source of our joy are intimately entwined. Our sorrow is that we have forgotten who we are, we have forgotten we are one with that source of all life -- absolutely indestructible, perfect, joyful. The source of our joy is when we remember that.

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.

Testing ourselves over and again, learning love and love and love!

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

Just because somebody drops in on you from another dimension, don't assume they're wiser than you about anything at all, or that they can do anything better than you can do yourself. Discarnate or mortal, what matters about people is what they know.

Nobody means to get carried away in mediocrity, but it happens, it happens unless you think about everything you do, unless you make every choice the best one you know how to make.

Passionately obsessed by anything we love -- an avalanche of magic flattens the way ahead, levels, rules, reasons, dissents, bears us with it over chasms, fears, doubts. Without the power of that love.

Anything we need to know, we can learn it from a book.

Never stop being a kid, Richard. 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.

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.

An airplane stands for freedom, for joy, for the power to understand, and to demonstrate that understanding.

There is a family of us who have this yearning for a kind of excellence that we can manifest every day of our lives, a family who wants to believe we're not pawns, we're not victims on this planet, that knows we have the power within us here and now to change the world we see around us!

You wait a lifetime to meet someone who understands you, accepts you as you are. At the end, you find that someone, all along, has been you.

We're the bridge across forever, arching above the sea, adventuring for our pleasure, living mysteries for the fun of it, choosing disasters triumphs challenges impossible odds, testing ourselves over and again, learning love and love and love!

You are led, when you share your loves, to an enchanted life of inner happiness, which unsharing others cannot know.

To begin with, you've got to understand that a seagull is an unlimited idea of freedom, an image of the Great Gull, and your whole body, from wingtip to wingtip, is nothing more than your thought itself.

It was morning, and the new sun sparkled gold across the ripples of a gentle sea.

Boredom between two people doesn't come from being together physically. It comes from being apart mentally and spiritually.

No matter how qualified or deserving we are, we will never reach a better life until we can imagine it for ourselves and allow ourselves to have it.

That's why love stories don't have endings! They don't have endings because love doesn't end.

What would our lives be like without tests, odds against us, adventure, risk?

I had experiences along the way that helped me to realize that letting go was the way that worked for me to find something that I, personally, as a reader, love to read.

The creative, loving-something life is also the healthy one. There is healing and protection in doing what makes you happy.

This kind of thinking, he found, is not the way to make one's self popular with other birds. Even his parents were dismayed as Jonathan spent whole days alone, making hundreds of low-level glides, experimenting.

Judge not by the form of the messenger, but the form of the message.

You'd chosen to be an upright biped on the surface of a small planet of a minor sun on the edge of a minor galaxy of one of the multiple trillions of universes. That's OK. It doesn't matter what form you take.

So this world, I think, and an indefinite number of other worlds of our creation, are also -- we're here for fun; we're here for learning; we're here for remembering who we are, and who we are, are expressions of life so absolutely linked with the life that is, always was, always will be.

If our body is a perfect expression of our thought about body, and if our thought about body is that it's condition has everything to do with inner image and nothing to do with time, then we don't have to be impatient for being too young or frightened of being too old.

Whatever We Hold in Thought Comes True in Our Experience; Like Attracts Like; we experiment with the Law of Changing Appearances, to make our outer world reflect our inner.

Nothing happens by chance, my friend... No such thing as luck.

Books arent written on whim or promises. Books are written on years turned inside out by ideas that never let go until you get them in print, and even then writings a last resort, a desperate ransom you pay to get your life back.

It doesn't take time to change once you understand the problem...Somebody hands you a rattlesnake, it doesn't take long to drop it, does it?

It must happen to us all…We pack up what we've learned so far and leave the familiar behind. No fun, that shearing separation, but somewhere within, we must dimly know that saying goodbye to safety brings the only security we'll ever know.

Remember where you came from, where you're going, and why you created this mess you got yourself into in the first place.

You seek problems because you need their gifts.

If you argue for your limitations they are yours.

I am tired of clinging. Though I cannot see it with my eyes, I trust that the current knows where it is going. I shall let go, and let it take me where it will. Clinging, I shall die of boredom.

Two things I do value a lot, intimacy and the capacity for joy, didn't seem to be on anyone else s list. I felt like the stranger in a strange land, and decided I'd better not marry the natives.

Perspective -- Use It or Lose It.

She didn't mean to be sexy that moment, but even a winter nightgown couldn't hide that lovely outline. When will I outgrow my simple-minded fascination with the form she had happened to choose for her body? Never, I thought.

You choose, you live the consequences. Every yes, no, maybe, creates the school you call your personal experience.

Wrong turns are as important as right turns. More important, sometimes.

Silly ideas, worth the admission price in smiles, but they're true. Is high-energy physics interesting because it's true or because it's crazy?

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.

You are life, inventing form. No more can you die on sword or years than you can die on doorways through which you walk, one room into another. Every room gives its word for you to speak, every passage its song for you to sing.

Cherish yesterday, Dream tomorrow, Live today.

Without my airplane I am an ordinary man, and a useless one -- a trainer without a horse, a sculptor without marble, a priest without a god. Without an airplane I am a lonely consumer of hamburgers.

The original sin is to limit the Is. Don't.

The river delights to lift us free, if only we dare let go.

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.

I take the paraglider to the mountain or I roll Daisy out of her hangar and I pick the prettiest part of the sky and I melt into the wing and then into the air, till I'm just soul on a sunbeam.

It's like, at the end, there's this surprise quiz: Am I proud of me? I gave my life to become the person I am right now. Was it worth what I paid?

Like everything else, Fletcher. Practice.

We choose our next world through what we learn in this one. Learn nothing, and the next world is the same as this one, all the same limitations and lead weights to overcome.

We can lift ourselves out of ignorance, we can find ourselves as creatures of excellence and intelligence and skill.

A moment later Jonathan's body wavered in the air, shimmering, and began to go transparent. Don't let them spread silly rumors about me, or make me a god. O.K., Fletch? I'm a seagull. I like to fly, maybe.

Jonathan Seagull discovered that boredom and fear and anger are the reasons that a gull's life is so short, and with those gone from his thought, he lived a long fine life indeed.

You don't love hatred and evil, of course. You have to practice and see the real gull, the good in every one of them, and to help them see it in themselves. That's what I mean by love.

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 was not flying that matters, but eating. For this gull, though, it was not eating that mattered, but flight.

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

Overcome space, and all we have left is Here. Overcome time, and all we have left is Now.

He was not bone and feather but a perfect idea of freedom and flight, limited by nothing at all.

All of us are called by something in this world that attracts us. And it doesn't matter what it is -- you can be an engine mechanic or an aviator or you can be someone who loves their flower garden or the world of commerce or sailboats.

All we see of someone at any moment is a snapshot of their life, there in riches or poverty, in joy or despair. Snapshots don't show the million decisions that led to that moment.

Those who win are those who think they can.

We are all learners, doers, and teachers.

Dying is like diving into a deep lake on a hot day. There's the shock of that sharp, cold change, the pain of it for a second, and then accepting is a swim in reality. But after so many times, even the shock wears off.

Did you ever feel that you were missing someone you had never met?

Within each of us lies the power of our consent to health and sickness, to riches and poverty, to freedom and to slavery. It is we who control these, and not another.

Laughing on the way to your execution is not generally understood by less-advanced life forms, and they call you crazy.

Look in the mirror and one thing is sure: what we see is not who we are.

Of course there's destiny, but destiny doesn't push you where you don't want to go. You're the ones who choose. Destiny is up to you.

Were we, also, hiking along some cosmic journal page? Were the events about us all part of a message we could understand, if only we found the right perspective from which to read them? Somehow, with our long series of miracles, I thought so.

A cloud does not know why it moves in just such a direction and at such a speed, it feels an impulsion... this is the place to go now. But the sky knows the reasons and the patterns behind all clouds, and you will know, too, when you lift yourself high enough to see beyond horizons.

If you really want to remove a cloud from your life, you do not make a big production of it, you just relax and remove it from your thinking. That's all there is to it.

Build an inner place to protect your truth.

When you're flying, an airplane doesn't care who you are; it doesn't care how much money you make or don't make. All it cares about is: How well do you fly? How well do you know the airplane? How well do you know the sky?

There is such a thing as perfection...and our purpose for living is to find that perfection and show it forth....Each of us is in truth an unlimited idea of freedom. Everything that limits us we have to put aside.

Fly free and happy beyond birthdays and across forever, and we'll meet now and then when we wish, in the midst of the one celebration that never can end.

If we must lose wife or husband when we live to our highest right, we lose an unhappy marriage as well, and we gain ourselves. But if a marriage is born between two already self-discovered, what a lovely adventure begins, hurricanes and all.

Part of us is always the observer, and no matter what, it observes. It watches us. It does not care if we are happy or unhappy, if we are sick or well, if we live or die. It's only job is to sit there on our shoulder and pass judgment on whether we are worthwhile human beings.

The best way to avoid responsibility is to say, 'I've got
responsibilities.

Mistakes -- call them unexpected learning experiences.

You're never given a dream without also being given the power to make it true.

A tiny change today brings a dramatically different tomorrow.

It's like a pulsar inside me. There is this great burst of energy, forcing me to write, and then the star goes quiet for a time, and I think it's gone, but it's gathering energy for another burst. And I seem to be almost unwilling participants in this.

Your only obligation in any lifetime is to be true to yourself.

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

Sense of family is enormously important to me. In the larger sense, we're all of us family; we're all of us soulmates.

A soulmate is someone who has locks that fit our keys, and keys to fit our locks.

What the caterpillar calls the end of the world, the master calls a butterfly.

Get this in mind early: We never grow up.

Live never to be ashamed if anything you say or do is published around the world, even if what is said is not true.

I don't want to do business with those who don't make a profit, because they can't give the best service.

Civilization... wrecks the planet from seafloor to stratosphere.

Strong beliefs win strong men, and then make them stronger.

The more I want to get something done, the less I call it work.

You teach best what you most need to learn.

If it's never our fault, we can't take responsibility for it. If we can't take responsibility for it, we'll always be its victim.

The simplest questions are the most profound. Where were you born? Where is your home? Where are you going? What are you doing? Think about these once in a while and watch your answers change.

Ask yourself the secret of your success. Listen to your answer, and practice it.

Bad things are not the worst things that can happen to us. Nothing is the worst thing that can happen to us!

There are no mistakes. The events we bring upon ourselves, no matter how unpleasant, are necessary in order to learn what we need to learn; whatever steps we take, they're necessary to reach the places we've chosen to go.

Our soulmate is the one who makes life come to life.

Listen to what you know instead of what you fear.

Learning is finding out what you already know.

I want to be very close to someone I respect and admire and have somebody who feels the same way about me.

Allow the world to live as it chooses, and allow yourself to live as you choose.

If you will practice being fictional for a while, you will understand that fictional characters are sometimes more real than people with bodies and heartbeats.

You are always free to change your mind and choose a different future, or a different past.

The meaning I picked, the one that changed my life: Overcome fear, behold wonder.

In order to live free and happily you must sacrifice boredom. It is not always an easy sacrifice.

One of the great cosmic laws, I think, is that whatever we hold in our thought will come true in our experience. When we hold something, anything, in our thought, then somehow coincidence leads us in the direction that we've been wishing to lead ourselves.

You don't want a million answers as much as you want a few forever questions. The questions are diamonds you hold in the light. Study a lifetime and you see different colors from the same jewel.

If you love someone, set them free. If they come back they're yours; if they don't they never were.