Quotes on Great Aviation

Jonathan Livingston Seagull . . . was no ordinary bird. Most gulls don't bother_x000D_ _x000D_ 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_x000D_ _x000D_ gull, though, it was not eating that mattered, but flight. More than anything else,_x000D_ _x000D_ Jonathan Livingston Seagull loved to fly.

Pilots take no special joy in walking: pilots like flying.

It's wonderful to climb the liquid mountains of the sky. Behind me and before me is God and I have no fears.

Science, freedom, beauty, adventure: what more could you ask of life?

The bluebird carries the sky on his back.

Harmony comes gradually to a pilot and his plane. The wing does not want so much to fly true as to tug at the hands that guide it; the ship would rather hunt the wind than lay her nose to the horizon far ahead. She has a derelict quality in her character; she toys with freedom and hints at liberation, but yields her own desires gently.

Both optimists and pessimists contribute to society. The optimist invents the aeroplane, the pessimist the parachute.

If happy little bluebirds fly beyond the rainbow, why oh why can't I?

A pilot's business is with the wind, and with the stars, with night, with sand, with the sea. He strives to outwit the forces of nature. He stares with expectancy for the coming of the dawn the way a gardener awaits the coming of spring. He looks forward to port as a promised land, and truth for him is what lives in the stars.

Travelers are always discoverers, especially those who travel by air. There are no signposts in the sky to show a man has passed that way before. There are no channels marked. The flier breaks each second into new uncharted seas.

And the winds and the waves are always on the side of the ablest navigators.

I have flown in just about everything, with all kinds of pilots in all parts of the world - British, French, Pakistani, Iranian, Japanese, Chinese - and there wasn't a dime's worth of difference between any of them except for one unchanging, certain fact: the best, most skillful pilot has the most experience.

The airplane has unveiled for us the true face of the earth.

The reason birds can fly and we can't is simply that they have perfect faith, for to have faith is to have wings.

For all professional pilots there exists a kind of guild, without charter and without by-laws. it demands no requirements for inclusion save an understanding of the wind, the compass, the rudder, and fair fellowship.

As soon as we left the ground, I knew I had to fly.

Courage is the price that Life exacts for granting peace, The soul that knows it not, knows no release, From little things; Knows not the livid loneliness of fear Nor mountain heights where bitter joy can hear The sound of wings.

There's no such thing as a natural-born pilot.

I was always afraid of dying. Always. It was my fear that made me learn everything I could about my airplane and my emergency equipment, and kept me flying respectful of my machine and always alert in the cockpit.

A single lifetime, even though entirely devoted to the sky, would not be enough for the study of so vast a subject. A time will come when our descendants will be amazed that we did not know things that are so plain to them.

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.