Top 427 Quotes & Sayings by Richard Bach - Page 5

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.

My way of writing a book is completely disorganized - to hurl myself at the problem, over and over.

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.

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.

Nothing good is a miracle, nothing lovely is a dream.

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.

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.

Most gulls don't bother to learn more than the simplest facts of flight - how to get from shore to food and back again

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

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

Grief is no more necessary when we understand death than fear is necessary when we understand flying.

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.

Only a few people are interested in what you have to say, but that is all right. You don't have to tell the quality of a master by the size of his crowds.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I'll quote the truth wherever I find it thank you.

To learn anything, you must put aside the safety of your ignorance.

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?

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.

Everything of this life as a mortal is fiction. It seems real, but...

Why had such a promising world been crucified on the tree of obligation, thorned by duties, hanged by hypocrisy, smothered by customs?

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

Compelling reason will never convince blinding emotion.

You don't tell the quality of a master by the size of his crowds.

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!

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.

No matter how qualified you are, you won't reach a better life until you imagine it.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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!

I have a way of finding what is true for me, and it’s not finished yet.

We love action and adventure, but we use it to go out and start wars and kill people.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

You seek problems because you need their gifts.

How easy it is to be compassionate when it's yourself you see in trouble.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

With every choice you risk the life you would have had; with every decision, you lose it.

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.

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.

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!

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.