Richard Bach
The only way to avoid all frightening choices is to leave society and become a hermit, and that is a frightening choice.Collection: Choices
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.Collection: Air
The world's crazy, when it comes to beauty.Collection: Beauty
We wait all these years to find someone who understands us, I thought, someone who accepts us as we are, someone with a wizard's power to melt stone to sunlight, who can bring us happiness in spite of trials, who can face our dragons in the night, who can transform us into the soul we choose to be. Just yesterday I found that magical Someone is the face we see in the mirror: It's us and our homemade masks.Collection: Night
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.Collection: War
What was the question? ...Oh. Where do I get my crazy ideas? Answer: sleep-fairy, walk-fairy, shower-fairy. Book-fairy. And in these last few years, from my wife. Now when I have questions I ask her and she tells me the answer. If you haven't already, I'd suggest you want to find your soulmate, as soon as you can. Next question?Collection: Soulmate
What a story that would make! How many men and women go through the same rivers, menaced by the same sharp clichés, the same jagged dangers that have threatened us! If the idea stands up, I thought, it would be worth uncovering the typewriter! How Richard-years-ago would have wanted to know: What happens when we set off searching for a soulmate who doesn't exist, and find her?Collection: Soulmate
Sooner I'd try to change history than turn political, than try convincing others to write letters or to vote or to march or to do something they didn't already feel like doing.Collection: Change
Those who win are those who think they can.Collection: Positive
It had never gotten old for him, flying. Never gone boring. Every engine start was a new adventure, guiding the spirit of a lovely machine back into life; every takeoff blending his spirit with its own to do what's never been done in history, to lift away from the ground and fly.Collection: Adventure
Never stop feeling and seeing and being excited with great things like air and engines and sounds of sunlight within you.Collection: Air
We are each given a block of marble when we begin a lifetime, and the tools to shape it into sculpture... We can drag it behind us untouched, we can pound it into gravel, we can shape it into glory.Collection: Block
Thought plus belief equals manifestation.Collection: Belief
To fly as fast as thought, to anywhere that is, you must begin by knowing that you have already arrived.Collection: Inspirational
Do you ever have the feeling you're a tourist on earth?Collection: Feelings
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?Collection: Self
The space for what you want is already filled with what you settled for instead.Collection: Space
One must first learn to fall if one would fly.Collection: Fall
Judge not by the form of the messenger, but the form of the message.Collection: Judging
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.Collection: Morning
One way to pick a future is to believe it’s inevitable.Collection: Believe
How can a deer tell when a leaf falls silent in the forest? She hears it breathing differently.Collection: Fall
Before you'll change, something important must be at risk.Collection: Risk
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.Collection: Son
The first prerequisite of an advanced being is a sense of humor.Collection: Firsts
Two words: Love leads. Listen to that ring of love within. If we follow that leading of love we'll be guaranteed an adventurous, positive, joyful life.Collection: Two
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.Collection: Kids
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.Collection: Evil
Wrong turns are as important as right turns. More important, sometimes.Collection: Important
Have you ever felt so at one with the world, with the universe, with everything that is, that you were overcome with love? That is reality. That is the truth. What we make of it is up to us, as the painting of the sunrise is up to the artist. In our world humanity has strayed from that love. It lives hatred and power struggles and manipulations of the earth itself for its own narrow reasons. Continue and no one will see the sunrise. The sunrise will always exist, of course, but people on earth will know nothing of it and finally even stories of its beauty will fade from our knowing.Collection: Struggle
An easy life doesn't teach us anything. In the end it's the learning that matters: what we've learned and how we've grownCollection: Life
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.Collection: Flower
Part One: I do not exist to impress the world. I exist to live my life in a way that will make me happy. Part Two: Everybody else is free to do whatever they feel like doing, for a living. Part Three: Responsible is Able to Respond, able to answer for the way we choose to live. There's only one person we have to answer to, of course, and that is ourselves.Collection: Two
Believe you know all the answers, and you know all the answers. Believe you're a master, and you are.Collection: Believe
That’s why love stories don’t have endings! They don’t have endings because love doesn’t end.Collection: Stories
What I love doing is basically two things: I love flying airplanes and I love communication.Collection: Communication
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.Collection: Song
Instead of our drab slogging forth and back to the fishing boats, there's reason to live! We can lift ourselves out of ignorance, we can find ourselves as creatures of excellence and intelligence and skill. We can learn to be free! we can learn to fly!Collection: Ignorance
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.Collection: Years
Some religions believe that there's a hierarchy, that you don't have a connection, but you must go through the shaman or the priest or whoever the religious leader is. And that's what surprises me, that some people who find a huge value in these kinds of systems also seem to enjoy ILLUSIONS. I can't figure it out.Collection: Religious
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."Collection: Book
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!Collection: Fun
If we believe that we're separated from someone, though they stand in the same room with us, we're separated. If we believe that we're together, if we believe that they are with us, if we listen through our inner senses, there's a chance we'll hear.Collection: Believe
There is a sense of oneness that from time to time I'm aware of in my life. Certainly not all the time, and there are times when I get frightened and when I get upset. But at the best of times, it's a personal oneness.Collection: Oneness
A tiny change today brings us to a dramatically different tomorrow. There are grand rewards for those who pick the high hard roads, but those rewards are hidden by years. Every choice is made in the uncaring blind, no guarantees from the world around us.Collection: Years
Anything we need to know, we can learn it from a book. Reading, careful study, a little practice, and we’re throwing knives expertly, overhauling engines, speaking Esperanto like natives.Collection: Reading
Nothing happens by chance, my friend... No such thing as luck. A meaning behind every little thing, and such a meaning behind this. Part for you, part for me, may not see it all real clear right now, but we will, before long.Collection: Real
How is it we’re the lucky ones, living a life that the children-we-were took for dreams?Collection: Dream
The conversation between Fletcher and Jonathan Livingston Seagull is centered on why some have achieved more than others . . . are they divine . . . ahead of their times . . . Fletcher says, Well, this kind of flying has always been here to be learned by anybody who wanted to discover it; that's got nothing to do with time. We're ahead of the fashion, maybe. Ahead of the way most gulls fly. Poor Fletch. Don't you believe what your eyes are telling you? All they show is limitations. Look with your understanding, find out what you already know, and you'll see the way to fly.Collection: Fashion