Richard Bach, the celebrated author behind timeless works like Jonathan Livingston Seagull and Illusions: The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah, has gifted readers with profound insights into life, freedom, and self-discovery. His words have a unique way of touching the soul, offering encouragement in times of doubt and inspiration when we’re in search of purpose. Whether you’re a long-time fan or a newcomer to his writings, exploring Richard Bach quotes is like taking a spiritual journey through the mind of a visionary.
In this blog, we’ll dive into some of his most memorable quotes and uncover the deeper meanings that continue to resonate with readers around the world.
Richard Bach Quotes
- Don’t believe what your eyes are telling you. All they show is limitation. Look with your understanding. Find out what you already know and you will see the way to fly.
2. That’s why love stories don’t have endings! They don’t have endings because love doesn’t end.
3. The opposite of Loneliness is not Togetherness, It’s Intimacy.
4. Happiness is a choice. It is not always an easy one.
5. The more I want to get something done the less I call it work.
6. Only a few people are interested in what you have to say, but that’s all right. You don’t tell the quality of a master by the size of his crowds, remember.
7. The meaning I picked, the one that changed my life: Overcome fear, behold wonder.
8. We teach best what we most need to learn.
9. We can lift ourselves out of ignorance, we can find ourselves as creatures of excellence and intelligence and skill.
10. To bring anything into your life, imagine that it’s already there.
11. Mine’s a free life, but it does get lonely sometimes.
12. Bad things are not the worst things that can happen to us. NOTHING is the worst thing that can happen to us.
13. There is no such thing as a problem without a gift for you in its hands. You seek problems because you need their gifts.
14. Look in the mirror and one thing is sure: what we see is not who we are.
15. Real love stories never have endings.
16. Wrong turns are as important as right turns. More important, sometimes.
17. Keep working on love.
18. The only thing that shatters dreams is compromise.
19. Ask yourself the secret of your success. Listen to your answer, and practice it.
20. What the caterpillar calls the end of the world, the master calls a butterfly.
21. Every person, all the events of your life are there because you have drawn them there. What you choose to do with them is up to you.
22. Don’t believe what your eyes are telling you. All they show is limitation. Look with your understanding. Find out what you already know and you will see the way to fly.
23. Here’s the test to find whether your mission on Earth is finished: if you’re alive, it isn’t.
24. There are grand rewards for those who pick the high hard roads, but those rewards are hidden by years.
25. Don’t turn away from possible futures before you’re certain you don’t have anything to learn from them.
26. You’re always free to change your mind and choose a different future, or a different past.
27. One way to pick a future is to believe it’s inevitable.
28. You teach best what you most need to learn
29. The simplest things are often the truest.
30. Remember where you came from, where you’re going, and why you created this mess you got yourself into in the first place.
31. Every gift from a friend is a wish for your happiness.
32. Believe you know all the answers, and you know all the answers. Believe you’re a master, and you are.
33. Sooner or later, those who win are those who think they can.
34. If your happiness depends on what somebody else does, I guess you do have a problem.
35. You are never given a wish without also being given the power to make it true. You may have to work for it, however.
36. A professional writer is an amateur who didn’t quit.
37. The bond that links your true family is not one of blood, but of respect and joy in each other’s life. Rarely do members of one family grow up under the same roof.
38. Nothing good is a miracle, nothing lovely is a dream.
39. Can miles truly separate you from friends… If you want to be with someone you love, aren’t you already there?
40. Every problem has a gift for you in its hands.
41. The only obligation we have in any lifetime is to be true to ourselves.
42. 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.
43. In order to live free and happily, you must sacrifice boredom. It is not always an easy choice.
44. 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.
45. Heaven is not a place, and it is not a time. Heaven is being perfect.
46. It’s not when you start that makes your success in the world, but when you quit.
47. Learning is finding out what you already know.
48. A tiny change today brings a dramatically different tomorrow.
49. Your conscience is the measure of the honesty of your selfishness. Listen to it carefully.
50. An author is a writer who didn’t give up.
51. Your friends will know you better in the first minute you meet than your acquaintances will know you in a thousand years.
52. All the people, all the events in your life are put there for a reason. What you choose to do with them is up to you.
53. If you love somebody, set them free. If they return, they were always yours. If they don’t, they never were.
54. Any powerful idea is absolutely fascinating and absolutely useless until we choose to use it.
55. I do not exist to impress the world. I exist to live my life in a way that will make me happy.
56. 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.
57. 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 grown.
58. I’m here not because I am supposed to be here, or because I’m trapped here, but because I’d rather be with you than anywhere else in the world.
59. Boredom between two people doesn’t come from being together physically. It comes from being apart mentally and spiritually.
60. You have the freedom to be yourself, your true self, here and now, and nothing can stand in your way.
61. Here is the test to find whether your mission on Earth is finished: If you’re alive, it isn’t.
62. Listen to what you know instead of what you fear.
63. If you love something, set it free; if it comes backs it’s yours, if it doesn’t, it never was.
64. You are never given a dream without also being given the power to make it true. You may have to work for it, however.
65. True love stories never have endings.
66. Your only obligation in any lifetime is to be true to yourself.
67. Happiness is the reward we get for living to the highest right we know.
68. Don’t be dismayed at good-byes. A farewell is necessary before you can meet again. And meeting again, after moments or lifetimes, is certain for those who are friends.
69. Argue for your limitations and, sure enough, they’re yours.
70. 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.
71. You’re never given a dream without also being given the power to make it true.
72. Overcome space, and all we have left is Here. Overcome time, and all we have left is Now.
73. Sooner or later, those who win are those who think they can.
74. 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.
75. The world is a dream, you say, and it’s lovely, sometimes. Sunset. Clouds. Sky.” “No. The image is a dream. The beauty is real. Can you see the difference?
76. 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.
77. Here’s how the people live here, in big house-shaped boxes to keep off ‘rain’ and ‘snow,’ holes cut in the sides so they can see out. They move around in smaller boxes, painted different colours, with wheels on the corners. They need this box-culture because each person thinks of herself and himself as locked in a box called a ‘body,’ arms and legs, fingers to move pencils and tools, languages because they’ve forgotten how to communicate, eyes because they’ve forgotten how to see. Odd little planet. Wish you were here. Home soon.
78. Nothing happens by chance, my friend… No such thing as luck.
79. Reality is divinely indifferent.
80. A soulmate is someone who has locks that fit our keys, and keys to fit our locks.
81. Do you have any idea how many lives we must have gone through before we even got the first idea that there is more to life than eating, or fighting, or power in the Flock? A thousand lives, Jon, ten thousand!
82. Thanks to you, I always am so happy. Now I want to give you all the happiness on your birthday.
83. Jonathan is that brilliant little fire that burns within us all, that lives only for those moments when we reach perfection.
84. He spoke of very simple things- that it is right for a gull to fly, that freedom is the very nature of his being, that whatever stands against that freedom must be set aside, be it ritual or superstition or limitation in any form. “Set aside,” came a voice from the multitude, “even if it be the Law of the Flock?” “The only true law is that which leads to freedom,” Jonathan said. “There is no other.
85. 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?
86. The bond that links your true family is not one of blood, but of respect and joy in each other’s life.
87. I want to be very close to someone I respect and admire and have somebody who feels the same way about me.
88. Life’s battles don’t always go to the strongest or fastest; sooner or later those who win are those who think they can.
89. To fly as fast as thought, to anywhere that is, you must begin by knowing that you have already arrived.
90. Not being known doesn’t stop the truth from being true.
91. Before you’ll change, something important must be at risk.
92. To learn anything, you must put aside the safety of your ignorance.
93. He who argues for his limitations gets to keep them.
94. How easy it is to be compassionate when it’s yourself you see in trouble.
95. Jonathan sighed. The price of being misunderstood, he thought. They call you devil or they call you god.
96. Remember the high board at the swimming pool? After days of looking up at it you finally climbed the wet steps to the platform. From there, it was higher than ever. There were only two ways down: the steps to defeat of the dive to victory. You stood on the edge, shivering in the hot sun, deathly afraid. At last you leaned too far forward, it was too late for retreat, and you dived. The high board was conquered, and you spent the rest of the day diving. Climbing a thousand high boards, we demolish fear, and turn into human beings.
97. Every step in every proud life is a run from safety to the dark, and the only thing to trust is what we think is true.
98. How can we resent the life we’ve created for ourselves? Who’s to blame, who’s to credit, but us? Who can change it, any time we wish, but us?
99. We think, sometimes, there’s not a dragon left. Not one brave knight, not a single princess gliding through secret forests… What a pleasure to be wrong. Princesses, knights, enchantments and dragons, mystery and adventure… not only are they here-and-now, they’re all that ever lived on earth!
100. Sense of family is enormously important to me. In the larger sense, we’re all of us family; we’re all of us soulmates.
101. Rarely do members of the same family grow up under the same roof.
102. A writer, or a beginning writer, is faced by the huge walls of self-consciousness. Most people think, “What if I say the wrong thing? What if I don’t sound erudite and sophisticated? I’ll be considered a fool.” In time, with a lot of practice, you realize that’s your foolishness is your gift.
103. 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.
104. Remember where you came from, where you’re going, and why you created the mess you got yourself into in the first place. You’re going to die a horrible death, remember. It’s all good training, and you’ll enjoy it more if you keep the facts in mind. Take your dying with some seriousness, however. Laughing on the way to your execution is not generally understood by less-advanced life-forms, and they’ll call you crazy.
105. There were times in my life when I said, “Oh God, I’m making a terrible, terrible mistake here.” And on another level it looked as if that’s exactly what I had done. All of us can look back across our lives and see what we thought was a disaster was actually a blessing – from a long-term perspective, it was a blessing. With practice, we can shorten the length of time between “what a dumb mistake I’ve made” and “what a brilliant choice that was.
106. 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.
107. We [people] have the power to destroy ourselves as well as the environment. As a species we love what I’d call brinks-person-ship, going right to the edge of disaster and somehow managing to pull back and recover. But my bet is still on the creative and playful and positive in the species. I think we will manage to survive and gradually turn things around.
108. Your whole body, from wingtip to wingtip,” Jonathan would say, other times, “is nothing more than your thought itself, in a form you can see. Break the chains of your thought, and you break the chains of your body, too
109. I’ll quote the truth wherever I find it thank you.
110. Pain and adversity are powerful vehicles to promote personal growth. Nothing helps you learn, grow, and evolve more quickly. Nothing offers you as big an opportunity to reclaim more of your authentic power as a person.
111. If we change in different directions, then we don’t have any future anyway, do we? I think it’s possible for two people to change together, to grow together and enrich instead of diminish each other. The sum of one and one, if they’re the right ones, can be infinity! But so often one person drags the other down; one person wants to go up like a balloon and the other’s a dead weight. I’ve always wondered what it would be like if both people, if a woman and a man both wanted to go up like balloons!
112. 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.
113. In the path of our happiness shall we find the learning for which we have chosen this lifetime.
114. I’m not approachable by someone who says, “Let’s try some drugs,” or something like that. I’m absolutely close-minded about that kind of thing. But I’m wide open to anyone who says, “I’ve been wondering why we’re here and where we’re going, and I’ve got a few answers, but I wondered if anything ever happened to you that suggests…” Then they have me, and I become a chatterbox and can just talk away literally for days.
115. 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.
116. Flying prevails whenever a man and his airplane are put to a test of maximum performance.
117. 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.
118. Why, Jon, why?” his mother asked. “Why is it so hard to be like the rest of the flock, Jon? Why can’t you leave low flying to the pelicans, the alhatross? Why don’t you eat? Son, you’re bone and feathers!” “I don’t mind being bone and feathers mom. I just want to know what I can do in the air and what I can’t, that’s all. I just want to know.
119. 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…
120. I don’t think any of my books tell the reader anything new. But they do remind, in a time that is strident and screeching about the limitations of this world and all the trouble we can get ourselves into.
121. Life does not require us to be consistent, cruel, patient, helpful, angry, rational, thoughtless, loving, rash, open-minded, neurotic, careful, rigid, tolerant, wasteful, rich, downtrodden, gentle, sick, considerate, funny, stupid, healthy, greedy, beautiful, lazy, responsive, foolish, sharing, pressured, intimate, hedonistic, industrious, manipulative, insightful, capricious, wise, selfish, kind or sacrificed. Life does, however, require us to live with the consequences of our choices.
122. Humanity is not a gift of nature, it is a spiritual achievement to be earned.
123. Don’t be dismayed by good-byes. A farewell is necessary before you can meet again. And meeting again, after moments or lifetimes, is certain for those who are friends.
124. You are led through your lifetime by the inner learning creature, the playful spiritual being that is your real self. Don’t turn away from possible futures before you’re certain you don’t have anything to learn from them. You’re always free to change your mind and choose a different future, or a different past.
125. Life tells you nothing, it shows you everything.
126. 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.
127. 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.
128. The only true law is that which leads to freedom.
129. Why? What is so wonderful about mass murder that nobody in the history of the world has ever fond any smarter solution to problems than killing everybody who doesn’t agree? Is that the limit of human intelligence?
130. So much of what we said sounded crazy, yet none of it was false… as if two theoretical physicists stood on stage to say that when we travel near lightspeed, we get younger than nontravellers; that a mile of space next to the sun is differnt than a mile of space next to the earth because the sun-mile space is curved more than the the earth-mile. 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?
131. The only enlightened masters I know are the people that I see every day and the people that I’ve seen through my life who have had the understanding, at some level, that we’re here to express love.
132. 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.
133. 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.
134. Sometimes when learning comes before experience It doesn’t make sense right away.
135. Nobody comes to Earth to dodge problems. We come here to take ’em on.
136. Having made the decision to love, had I chosen life instead of death?
137. 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. Our soulmate is the one who makes life come to life.
138. 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.
139. 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.
140. We’re different, we’re the same. You thought you’d never find a word to say to a woman who didn’t fly airplanes. I couldn’t imagine myself spending time with a man who didn’t love music. Could it be it’s not as important to be alike as it is to be curious? Because we’re different, we can have the fun of exchanging worlds, giving our loves and excitements to each other. You can learn music, I can learn flying. And that’s only the beginning. I think it would go on for us as long as we live.
141. 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.
142. We love action and adventure, but we use it to go out and start wars and kill people.
143. Anybody who’s ever mattered, anybody who’s ever been happy, anybody who’s ever given any gift into the world has been a divinely selfish soul, living for his own best interest. No exceptions.
144. I AM! YOU ARE! AND LOVE: IS ALL: THAT MATTERS!
145. We thought humble and proud at the same time, all at once in love again with this painful bittersweet lovely thing called flight.
146. Testing ourselves over and again, learning love and love and LOVE!
147. 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!
148. Your harshest truths are dreams, and your gentlest dreams are true.
149. 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?
150. 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.
151. Whatever enchants also guides and protects.
152. Reason and intellect are opening wedges in an understanding of reality.
153. Our soulmate is the one who makes life come to life.
154. The best way to pay for a lovely moment is to enjoy it.
155. You’ve given up your whole life to be the person you are now. Is it worth it?
156. You choose, you live the consequences. Every yes, no, maybe, creates the school you call your personal experience.
157. In order to live free and happily you must sacrifice boredom. It is not always an easy sacrifice.
158. Perspective – Use It or Lose It.
159. I don’t think creativity is mine to maintain. It automatically comes when we declare that “I am an expression of life, and life will express itself through me in the most playful and wonderful of ways, if I let it.”
160. I gave my life to become the person I am right now. Was it worth it?
161. No matter how qualified you are, you won’t reach a better life until you imagine it.
162. 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.
163. For a moment, off balance, was I annoyed? Anger is always fear, I thought, and fear is always fear of loss. Would I lose myself if he made those choices? It took a second to settle down: I’d lose nothing. They’d be his wishes, not mine, and he’s free to live as he wants. The loss would come if I dared force him, tried to live for him and me as well. There’d be disaster worse than life on a bar stool.
164. Some choices we live not only once but a thousand times over, remembering them for the rest of our lives.
165. What would our lives be like without tests, odds against us, adventure, risk?
166. There’s so much to learn! And just when we think, “I’ve got it. I really understand what’s going on,” we’re shown a whole new stage set on which to play.
167. The great thing about writing is, if you don’t like the world, we’ll create a different one.
168. Most gulls don’t bother to learn more than the simplest facts of flight – how to get from shore to food and back again.
169. For most gulls it was not flying that matters, but eating. For this gull, though, it was not eating that mattered, but flight.
170. Everything in this book may be wrong. – The Savior’s Manual.
171. 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.
172. The ideas behind the words are simple ones that work in everyday life; find what we most want to do; do it, no matter what; and in the doing be guaranteed a very difficult and a very happy lifetime.
173. Care about understanding and before you know it, in just a few decades, you’ll have a system of thinking that gives you answers whenever you ask.
174. Anything we need to know, we can learn it from a book.
175. From time to time it’s fun to close our eyes, and in that dark say to ourselves, ‘I am the sorcerer, and when I open my eyes I shall see a world that I have created, and for which I and only I am completely responsible.’ Slowly then, eyelids open like curtains lifting stage-center. And sure enough, there’s our world, just the way we’ve built it.
176. 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.
177. 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?
178. 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.
179. Heaven is not a place, and it is not a time. Heaven is being perfect.
180. 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.
181. You can’t solve problems for someone whose problem is that they don’t want problems solved.
182. Laughing on the way to your execution is not generally understood by less-advanced life forms, and they call you crazy.
183. Learning is finding out what you already know. Doing is demonstrating that you know it. Teaching is reminding others that they know just as well as you. You are all learners, doers, teachers.
184. You can achieve a goal; you never really achieve your purpose, because your purpose is ongoing. It never stops.
185. The space for what you want is already filled with what you settled for instead.
186. Everybody is given a Dream… you may have to work for it however.
187. The creative, loving-something life is also the healthy one. There is healing and protection in doing what makes you happy.
188. 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?
189. It doesn’t matter whether they [beloved ones] are on this planet or not on this planet anymore. Once something is bound by love, as long as that love exists, there is nothing that can separate us. There is the appearance of separation, but the heart, it always treasures and values that.
190. I think our learning lies along the path of whatever it is we love.
191. Real integrity is doing the right thing, knowing that nobody’s going to know whether you did it or not. Sooner or later, those who win are those who think they can.
192. How can we resent the life we’ve created for ourselves?
193. 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.
194. 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.
195. 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.
196. 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.
197. For pilots sometimes see behind the curtain, behind the veil of gossamer velvet, and find the truth behind man, the force behind a universe.
198. 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.
199. 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!
200. 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 to gravel, we can shape it into glory. Examples from every other life are left for us to see, lifeworks finished and unfinished, guiding and warning. Near the end our sculpture is nearly finished, and we can smooth and polish what we started years before. We can make our progress then, but to do it we must see past the appearances of age.
201. We’re all the sons of God, or children of the Is, or ideas of the Mind, or however else you want to say it.
202. The books remind us that way down deep in our hearts, part of us knows that we are creatures of light and we cannot be touched or destroyed by anything made out of atoms or destroyed at all – that light is indestructible. And we may reflect that and express that in multiple trillions of discrete ways, but nevertheless, that indestructible sense of joyful capacity to express life and express love is always there.
212. How is it we’re the lucky ones, living a life that the children-we-were took for dreams?
213. Through default or intention, unaware or by design, we not only choose but create the visible outer conditions that are most resonant to our inner state of being.
214. Don’t you think between here and now we will see each other once or twice?
215. Never stop feeling and seeing and being excited with great things like air and engines and sounds of sunlight within you.
216. 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.
217. Thought plus belief equals manifestation.
218. The only thing that matters, at the end of a stay on earth, is how well did we love, what was the quality of our love?
219. The original sin is to limit the Is. Don’t.
220. No one does anything uncharacteristic of who they are.
221. The best way to avoid responsibility is to say, ‘I’ve got responsibilities.
222. How can a deer tell when a leaf falls silent in the forest? She hears it breathing differently.
223. 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.
224. 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.
225. Avoid problems, and you’ll never be the one who overcame them.
226. It’s easy to live the expected and conventional. It’s when you live the unexpected that you start having fun with your life.
227. The river delights to lift us free, if only we dare let go.
228. 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.
229. The worst lies are the lies we tell ourselves.
230. An airplane stands for freedom, for joy, for the power to understand, and to demonstrate that understanding.
231. How much to learn if we could spend one hour, spend twenty minutes, with the us we will become! How much could we say to the us we were.
232. Never had I understood that I command, with absolute authority, the ship of my life! I decide its mission and rules and discipline, at my word waits every tool and sail, every cannon, the strength of every soul on board. I’m master of a team of passionate skills to sail me through hell’s own jaws the second I nod the direction to steer.
233. We must honor our dragons, encourage them to be worthy destroyers, expect they’ll strive to cut us down. It is their duty to ridicule us, it is their job to demean us, to force us if they can to stop being different! And when we walk our way no matter their fire and their fury, our dragons shrug when we’re out of sight, return to their card-games philosophical: ‘Ah well, we can’t toast ’em all…’
234. Shop for security over happiness and we buy it at that price.
235. What I love doing is basically two things: I love flying airplanes and I love communication.
236. 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.
237. Those who win are those who think they can.
238. 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.
239. There are two tests that we [writers] have for all of our writing: So What? and Who Cares? There is an answer to both. The answer to Who Cares is that a reader cares, if the writing is good. The answer to So What is that these ideas give us completely new understanding, change our sense of who we [people] are and why we’re here [on this planet].
240. Hate is love without enough data.
241. Your life is a treasure and you are so much more than you know.
242. There is a kind of silver spiderweb that’s spun around the world, and the strands of that web are certain loves and certain understandings. And if we follow those, and if we walk those strands, we’re going to meet others at the intersections who have been walking the same way across this web. And when we meet, there’s a kind of “I know who you are.”
243. As long as we believe in sequential time, we see becoming instead of being. Beyond time, we are all one.
244. The big thing about writing is three commands: Have fun. Don’t think. Don’t care.
245. “Then be sure of one thing:
The Is has imagined it quite a bit better than you have.
The original sin is to limit the Is. Don’t.”
246. It was morning, and the new sun sparkled gold across the ripples of a gentle sea.
247. There is something that is transcendental about when we are immersed in that which we most love.
248. Reality lies far beyond space and time, and I need to know why.
249. If you’re always looking at someone else, trying to imitate them, how can your natural gifts ever emerge?
250. That which most concerns and worries you – your survival – is the only certainty you have.
251. Numbers are limits, and perfection doesn’t have limits.
252. 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.
253. You don’t tell the quality of a master by the size of his crowds.
254. 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.
255. One school is finished, and the time has come for another to begin.
256. 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?
257. 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.
258. Why fly? Simple. I’m not happy unless there’s some room between me and the ground.
259. 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.
260. “What is my highest sense of right?” we can ask at any decision point in our lives and not worry about if this is going to lose us a lot of money or is this going to make us a lot of money or whatever.
261. Cherish yesterday, Dream tomorrow, Live today.
262. The first prerequisite of an advanced being is a sense of humor.
263. 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.
264. Anyone desperate enough for suicide… should be desperate enough to go to creative extremes to solve problems: elope at midnight, stow away on the boat to New Zealand and start over, do what they always wanted to do but were afraid to try.
265. There’s this wonderful and very important event when we’re born, and we forget everything that’s gone before, or else we’d be such a mass of rememberings that we couldn’t operate successfully on this planet.
266. 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?
267. The world is your exercise book, the pages on which you do your sums. It is not reality, though you may express reality there if you wish. You are also free to write lies, or nonsense, or to tear the pages.
268. The worst lies are the lies we tell ourselves. We live in denial of what we do, even what we think. We do this because we’re afraid.We fear we will not find love,and when we find it we fear we’ll lose it. We fear that if we don’t have love we will be unhappy.
269. Everything you’ve said, everything you want to believe is already true. You may not find some of it for a while, and some of it might take longer than that, but that doesn’t stop it from being true this minute!
270. 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.
271. Each of us is free to move our consciousness through that infinite pattern of possibilities as we please. If we’re filled with fears, or if we trust the fears of others, we’ll choose a path in which our city falls into the sea, or a path in which a third world war vaporizes us, or whatever other disaster is most thrilling or horrifying or fascinating for us.
272. Compelling reason will never convince blinding emotion.
273. We [people] have a teacher! The teacher is ourselves! We already know everything we need to know – our challenge is to discover that we know it. Turning to gurus, I think, we become guru-dependent, no different from drug-dependent, alcohol-dependent – needing an outside force to control our lives.
274. 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.
275. If we agree that the world is not what it seems, then we have an important question: What shall we do about it?
276. 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.
277. The world’s crazy, when it comes to beauty.
278. If you don’t want to be a teacher, you’d better get off this planet.
279. I like that you can open up any one of my books anywhere and immediately be lost. I just love them so much.
280. 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.
281. Do you ever have the feeling you’re a tourist on earth?
282. 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.
283. 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.
284. The man who flies an airplane … must believe in the unseen.
285. What a delighted fascination it is, to stand aside and watch our dearest friend perform on stage without us.
286. In the United States Christmas has become the rape of an idea.
287. We design our lives through the power of our choices. We feel most helpless when we’ve made choices by default, when we haven’t designed our lives on our own.
288. Like most writers, we like to find what we know and pass it along to anyone who cares. When that’s done, as soon as we’ve said the best we can say, there’s nothing else about us that’s remotely interesting to anybody else, and we go back behind the walls. We can be intimate in books, we can be intimate in talks, but then we need time to be alone.
289. 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.
290. What if somebody came along who could teach me how my world works and how to control it What if I could meet a super-advanced … what if a Siddhartha or a Jesus came into our time, with power over the illusions of the world because he knew the reality behind them And what if I could meet him in person, if he were flying a biplane, for instance, and landed in the same meadow with me.
291. When we’re born on this planet, we’re taught to believe that what we see is real. But as we grow in understanding, we recognize first that we’ve been hypnotized by that reaching, and second that it’s within our power to de-hypnotize ourselves. And as we do that, the illusion appears to change, to come in harmony with what we most value. If we most value love, we will begin to see more and more love and joy and adventure-creative expressions of life shimmering everywhere around us.
292. 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.
293. To me, one of the most profound questions we can ask is: “So what?” And so what if there’s an indefinite number of worlds with alternate “us-es” in them? The “so what,” to me, comes alive when I ask myself: “What if I could find a way to get in touch with those alternate mes who made those choices?” That is, persons who, if I saw them now, I wouldn’t even recognize because their choices, once small, have multiplied to make them such different people.
294. 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.
295. What matters is how I use what I know, every minute of every day; how I use it to remember, in the midst of the game.
296. In the highest sense, we are all creatures of light. And I have a very difficult time talking with people who are cynical about the world. “The world is no damn good, and we’re all animals,” and that kind of thing. Well, I’m an animal.
270. As you believe, so it is for you.
271. One of the cosmic laws, I think, is that whatever we hold in our thought will come true in our experience.
272. 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.
273. If we want to end this lifetime higher than we began, we can expect an uphill road.
274. At last, the answer why. The lesson that had been so hard to find, so difficult to learn, came quick and clear and simple. The reason for problems is to overcome them. Why, that’s the very nature of man, I thought, to press past limits, to prove his freedom. It isn’t the challenge that faces us, that determines who we are and what we are becoming, but the way we meet the challenge, whether we toss a match at the wreck or work our way through it, step by step, to freedom.
275. Fail at love, and the other tests don’t matter.
276. It took time to learn that the hard thing about writing is to let the story write itself, while one sits at the typewriter and does as little thinking as possible. It happened over and over again, and the beginner learned – when you start puzzling over an idea, and slowing down on the keys, the writing gets worse and worse.
277. It is by not always thinking of yourself, if you can manage it, that you might somehow be happy. Until you make room in your life for someone as important to you as yourself, you will always be searching and lost.
278. I was a microscopic life-form, infinitely large, stumbled backstage of its playhouse, caught a nanosecond glance of its own reality and nearly vaporized in shock.
279. Win by losing. Before your outer walls break, as break they must, build an inner place to protect your truth. Protect that you are infinite life, choosing its playground; protect that the world you know exists with your consent and for your own good reasons; protect that your purpose and mission is to shine love in your own playful way, in the moments you decide will be most dramatic.
280. 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.
281. The one thing we fear most is the one thing that is not possible: We cannot die, we cannot be destroyed.
282. 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.”
283. 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.
284. Every word that judges value is circular. ‘Good’ is ‘right’ is ‘proper’ is ‘just’ is ‘good’. But check the examples, and they’re not circular at all: Every one says ‘makes me happy’.
285. You’re never given a dream without the power to make it true.
286. 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.
287. 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.
288. Get this in mind early: We never grow up.
289. I’m utterly convinced of the One-ness of Love and us as its perfect reflection. I am absolutely convinced that the world around us is a world of appearances and anyone who wants to can practice it. Change your thought and your environment will change. It’s not instantaneous and sometimes we have to work very hard to make what we want happen. Working hard and holding that thought, it will change.
290. I’m a writer as rarely as possible, when forced by an idea too lovely to let die unwritten.
291. We know nothing until intuition agrees.
292. 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.
293. 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.
294. Reputation is what people think you are. Character is who you really are. Take care of your character and your reputation will take care of itself. The more I want to get something done, the less I call it work.
295. Fear is all the fear of some loss: “I’m going to lose something.” If we declare, and if we know in our hearts, “I already have everything that I need: I have life, I have creativity, I have joy, I have nourishment. I have everything I need,” and if we just say, “It doesn’t depend on my having a physical body to do it,” then everything opens up.
296. 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!
297. A drug for everything is madness. Legal or not, prescribed or not, over-counter under-counter bought for blood on street-corners-every pill separates us from knowing our own completion and from being taught by what’s true.
298. Next to ‘God’, ‘love’ is the word most mangled in every language.
299. Allow the world to live as it chooses, and allow yourself to live as you choose.
300. The more I want to get something done, the less I call it work.
301. If you want magic, let go of your armor. Magic is so much stronger than steel.
302. 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.
303. With every choice you risk the life you would have had; with every decision, you lose it.
304. Your only obligation in any lifetime is to be true to yourself. Being true to anyone else or anything else is not only impossible, but the mark of a fake messiah.
305. Does anybody learn writing, or do they just touch someone who lets them see the power of the deleted word?
306. Evolution made civilization steward of this planet. A hundred thousand years later, the steward stood before evolution not helper but destroyer, not healer but parasite. So evolution withdrew its gift, passed civilization by, rescued the planet from intelligence and handed it to love.
307. Grief is no more necessary when we understand death than fear is necessary when we understand flying.
308. We [Americans] are game-playing, fun-loving creatures; we are the otters of the universe.
309. 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.
310. Mortalhood is a fine state to visit, but you’d better not call it home.
311. A soulmate is someone who has locks that fit our keys, and keys to fit our locks. When we feel safe enough to open the locks, our truest selves step out and we can be completely and honestly who we are; we can be loved for who we are and not for who we’re pretending to be. Each unveils the best part of the other. No matter what else goes wrong around us, with that one person we’re safe in our own paradise.
312. 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.
313. Judge not by the form of the messenger, but the form of the message.
314. You teach best that which you need most to learn.
315. You are led through your lifetime by the inner learning creature, the playful spiritual being that is your real self.
316. And like no other sculpture in the history of art, the dead engine and dead airframe come to life at the touch of a human hand, and join their life with the pilot’s own.
317. With every decision that anyone makes, the world changes. The decision that we give our consent to is the one that remains in our consciousness, but the one that we didn’t make-that alternate world goes on in its own direction. So there’s uncountable numbers of alternate “us-es.”
318. The gulls who scorn perfection for the sake of travel go nowhere, slowly. Those who put aside travel for the sake of perfection go anywhere, instantly.
319. 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.
320. 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.
321. You are led, when you share your loves, to an enchanted life of inner happiness, which unsharing others cannot know.
322. Mistakes – call them unexpected learning experiences.
323. 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?’
324. I’m absolutely convinced that this is a world of appearances, not reality. There’s one reality and that’s Light and Love. When some say, we create our own reality, I always demur and say, “Please, would you mind adjusting that a little bit? We create our own appearances.” We become master of appearances and as we change our thought, we will see the appearances around us change. That gives us this huge sense of dominion and power and control over our world.
325. Navigate by the same star, unwilling to change, and you find yourself not only off-course but lost.
326. Sometimes when you say goodbye, that’s the right thing to do in a relationship.
327. I don’t want to do business with those who don’t make a profit, because they can’t give the best service.
328. Children are not our property, and they are not ours to control any more that we were our parents’ property or theirs to control.
329. 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.
330. I’m not a celebrity or near celebrity. Sometimes people will say, “You’re famous” and that stops me right there. What does fame mean? Fame is in the eye of the beholder. So, if somebody wants to call me ‘famous’, that’s their business. I’m just me, a guy who messes around with airplanes and writes books that make sense to him.
331. 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.
332. If you want to meet someone who can fix any situation you don’t like, who can bring you happiness in spite of what other people say or believe, look in a mirror, then say this magic word: ‘Hello.’
333. Did you ever feel that you were missing someone you had never met?
334. 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.
335. 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.
336. Whatever it is that calls us, that’s our path. And as we walk that path, we have a chance to shine forth who we are. It affects other people around us.
337. You seek problems because you need their gifts.
338. It’s okay is a cosmic truth…It’s okay. If there were nothing here for us to learn, we wouldn’t bother to pay the fare.
339. Next to God, love is the word most mangled in every language. The highest form of regard between two people is friendship, and when love enters, friendship dies.
340. 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.
341. 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.
342. “We look at some people as if they were special, gifted, divine. Nobody is special and gifted and divine.
No more than you are, no more than I am. The only difference, the very only one,
is that they have begun to understand what they really are and have begun to practice it.”
343. Not being known doesn’t stop the truth from being true. You are led through your lifetime by the inner learning creature, the playful spiritual being that is your real self. What the caterpillar calls the end of the world, the master calls a butterfly. Learning is finding out what we already know. Doing is demonstrating that you know it. Teaching is reminding others that they know just as well as you. You are all learners, doers and teachers. The best way to pay for a lovely moment is to enjoy it.
344. 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.
345. We all know those who draw their boundaries carefully and say, “I’m only human. Nobody’s perfect. I accept my limitations.” And we know others who take an opposite view and say, “I can do anything I choose to do. It is in my power to change the world.” And those are the ones who most often change the world.
346. 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.
347. By your choice dwell you now in the world which you have created. What you hold in your heart shall be true, and what you most admire, that shall you become.
348. 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.
349. 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.
350. Just be who you are, calm and clear and bright. Automatically, as we shine who we are, asking ourselves every minute is this what I really want to do, doing it only when we answer yes, automatically that turns away those who have nothing to learn from who we are and attracts those who do, and from whom we have to learn, as well.
351. One must first learn to fall if one would fly.
352. He was not bone and feather but a perfect idea of freedom and flight, limited by nothing at all.
353. The way to tell if your job is done: if you’re alive, you’ve got a job.
354. Flying has always been to me this wonderful metaphor. In order to fly you have to trust what you can’t see. Up on the mountain ridges where very few people have been I have thought back to what every flyer knows. That there is this special world in which we dwell that’s not marked by boundaries, it’s not a map. We’re not hedged about with walls and desks. So often in an office the very worst thing that can happen is you could drop your pencil. Out there’s a reminder that are a lot worse things, and a lot greater rewards.
355. Amazing. You were so attached to it, and it still disappeared for you.” “Attached! I was whocking that cloud with everything I had! Fireballs, laser beams, vacuum cleaner a block high…” “Negative attachments, Richard. If you really want to remove a cloud from your life, you do not make a big production out of it, you just relax and remove it from your thinking. That’s all there is to it.
356. Of course I’m a fake. We’re all fakes on this whole world, pretending to be something we’re not. We are not just bodies walking around, not just atoms, molecules. We are unkillable, undestroyable ideas of the IS, no matter how much we believe otherwise.
357. If you love someone, set them free. If they come back they’re yours; if they don’t they never were.
358. Hell is a place, a time, a consciousness, in which there is no love.
359. When we put up with any situation we don’t have to put up with, it’s not because we’re dumb. We put up with it, because we want the lesson only that situation can teach, and we want it more than freedom myself.
360. Character comes from following our highest sense of right, from trusting ideas without being sure they’ll work.
361. I have always wanted an adventurous life. It took a long time to realize that I was the only one who could make an adventurous life happen to me.
362. 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.
363. The only way to avoid all frightening choices is to leave society and become a hermit, and that is a frightening choice.
364. We design our lives through the power of choices.
365. 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.
366. 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.
367. The only thing that’s real in any universe [is] that brilliant fire of Love that burns to the exclusion of everything else. As we recognize the presence of Love, we break through the wall of grief that would try to convince us that the dear soul with whom we have learned and loved so much no longer exists, or that she or he cannot speak with us. There is no wall that Love cannot vaporize. We may believe in death, Love doesn’t.
368. 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.
369. We magnetize into our lives whatever we hold in our thought.
370. I have a way of finding what is true for me, and it’s not finished yet.
371. I do not enjoy writing at all. If I can turn my back on an idea, out there in the dark, if I can avoid opening the door to it, I won’t even reach for a pencil.
372. Like everything else, Fletcher. Practice.
373. 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.
374. 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.
375. 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.
376. We don’t have rights until we claim them.
377. “You’re master of what you’ve lived,
artisan at what you’re living,
amateur at what’s next to live.”
378. Rebuilding us. Isn’t that what the spirit requires, when we climb over the wreckage of our lives, sometimes, we go on to make our lives our own affirmation? We are perfect expressions of perfect Love, here and now. There is no permanent injury.
379. Civilization… wrecks the planet from seafloor to stratosphere.
380. There’s no disaster that can’t become a blessing, and no blessing that can’t become a disaster.
381. Yesterday is history, tomorrow is a mystery, today is a gift, that’s why we call it the present. If I am not for myself, who will be for me? And if I am only for myself, what am I? And If not now, when? A brick alone is nothing but a brick. It takes a collection of bricks to build a house. Instructor, what?? You mean you teach best what you most need to learn.
382. 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.
383. 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.
384. I relax my body completely, relax my mind completely, and then imagine myself at a level where anything can happen.
385. Strong beliefs win strong men, and then make them stronger.
386. My airplane is quiet, and for a moment still an alien, still a stranger to the ground, I am home.
387. Good and evil are not what our parents told us, not what our church tells us, or our country, not what anybody else tells us! All of us decide good and evil for ourselves, automatically, by choosing what we want to do!
388. In order to win, you must expect to win.
389. Languages are fluffy big pillows stuffed between nations – what others say is muffled and nearly lost in them, and when we speak their grammar we get feathers in our mouth. It’s worth it. What pleasure to phrase an idea, even in child’s words, slowly, and sail it across the gulf in another language to a different-speaking human being!
390. Think about these once in awhile, and watch your answers change.
391. Every real teacher is myself in disguise.
392. There is no such thing as a problem without a gift.
393. My way of writing a book is completely disorganized – to hurl myself at the problem, over and over.
394. Every problem in your life carries a gift inside it.
395. Live never to be ashamed if anything you say or do is published around the world, even if what is said is not true.
396. One of the delights of the new age is that it’s a turning of consciousness to give us permission to look beyond appearances. But there are traps that come with it. It’s brave to throw off the old altars and churches and ceremonies that kept us from discovery, it’s not so brave to replace them with chants and rituals and new priests who are retreads of the old.
397. You are always free to change your mind and choose a different future, or a different past.
398. The gull sees farthest who flies highest.
399. When one individual writer sings her song of beauty, she changes the lives of a million others.
400. Build an inner place to protect your truth.
401. Why had such a promising world been crucified on the tree of obligation, thorned by duties, hanged by hypocrisy, smothered by customs?
402. 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.
403. We can start working with time if you wish,” Chiang said, “till you can fly the past and the future. And then you will be ready to begin the most difficult, the most powerful, the most fun of all. You will be ready to begin to fly up and know the meaning of kindness and of love.
404. Don’t fear change. It’s always for the best.
405. “Jonathan Livingston Seagull . . . was no ordinary bird. 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.”
406. Do you have any idea how many lives we must have gone through before we even get the first idea that there is more to life than eating, or fighting, or power in the Flock? A thousand lives, Jon, ten thousand! And then another hundred lives until we began to learn that there is such a thing as perfection, and another hundred again to get the idea that our purpose for living is to find that perfection and show it forth… 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.
407. Money is a great isolator. In fact, we don’t even need to have money or make money, we only need to be perceived as having money to be isolated in the strangest ways from most of the community around us. It reaches the point where a person with money spends a great deal of time reacting to people who are reacting to the money.
408. Know that ever about you stands the reality of love, and each moment you have the power to transform your world by what you have learned.
409. Life does not listen to your logic; it goes on its own way, undisturbed. You have to listen to life.
410. 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.
411. When I’m writing it’s as if I’m the observer. It’s as if that computer screen there -it used to be the typewriter – just kind of dissolves and there’s this whirling tunnel of mist and there’s a kind of proscenium arch, and then there are my characters, and they say what they say, and I laugh sometimes in surprise at what they say.
412. In spite of my study, I have learned. Every grand religion begins in light. Yet only hearts hold light. Pages cannot. I have paper in my hands. Give these words to the world and they will be loved and understood by those who already know their truth. The truth doesn’t burn. The truth waits for anyone who wishes to find it… only these pages will burn. At one with the stars… with the pages and their love… one with everything that is, that ever was or will be. One.
413. Live enough of what you’ve always dreamed of doing, and there’s no room left for feeling bad.
414. Respect for sovereignity, for privacy, for total independence. Gentle alliances against loneliness, they were, cool rational love-affairs without the love.
415. If perfection is stagnation, then Heaven is a swamp.
416. If our friendship depends on things like space and time, then when we finally overcome space and time, we’ve destroyed our own brotherhood! But overcome space, and all we have left is Here. Overcome time, and all we have left is Now. And in the middle of Here and Now, don’t you think that we might see each other once or twice?
417. Whatever happens on the surface, it’s leading us in a direction. That beautiful core within us that is our character will make choices that will inevitably leads us to a higher understanding of who we are and why we’re here. And it’s best to be aware of that while it’s happening.
418. True enjoy stories never ever have endings.
419. Listen,’ he said. ‘It’s important. We are all. Free. To do. Whatever. We want. To do.
420. “Isn’t it strange how much we know
if only we ask ourselves
instead of somebody else.”
421. 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.
422. Everything of this life as a mortal is fiction. It seems real, but…
Conclusion
The power of Richard Bach quotes lies in their simplicity and depth. They remind us that life is about growth, love, and the courage to follow our unique path—even when it defies convention.
As we’ve seen, his words offer both comfort and challenge, urging us to look inward and rise above our perceived limitations.
Whether you keep a favorite quote on your desk or turn to his writings during moments of reflection, Richard Bach’s wisdom serves as a timeless guide for anyone seeking clarity and inspiration.
