Top 427 Quotes & Sayings by Richard Bach - Page 6

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.

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.

Having made the decision to love, had I chosen life instead of death?

In the United States Christmas has become the rape of an idea.

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.

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.

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.

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.

If we agree that the world is not what it seems, then we have an important question: What shall we do about it?

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

We [Americans] are game-playing, fun-loving creatures; we are the otters of the universe.

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

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.

The one thing we fear most is the one thing that is not possible: We cannot die, we cannot be destroyed.

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

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

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

How is it we’re the lucky ones, living a life that the children-we-were took for dreams?

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.

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?

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.

Everybody is given a Dream... you may have to work for it however.

Everything in this book may be wrong. - The Savior's Manual

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.

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.

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.

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."

When one individual writer sings her song of beauty, she changes the lives of a million others.

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.

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.

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.

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.

We thought humble and proud at the same time, all at once in love again with this painful bittersweet lovely thing called flight.

Shop for security over happiness and we buy it at that price.

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.

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.

Humanity is not a gift of nature, it is a spiritual achievement to be earned.

Perspective - Use It or Lose It.

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!

What I love doing is basically two things: I love flying airplanes and I love communication.

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.

If perfection is stagnation, then Heaven is a swamp.

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

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.

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.

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.

In the path of our happiness shall we find the learning for which we have chosen this lifetime.

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.