Richard Bach Quotes & Sayings

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. — Richard Bach

I didn't crash anything! They said I hit the wires, Don! I didn't see them!" "That explains it. You're a master when things go well, you're a victim when they go out of control." He was laughing at me. — Richard Bach

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. — Richard Bach

You've sacrificed your entire life to be who you are today. Was it worth it? — Richard Bach

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. — Richard Bach

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. — Richard Bach

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. — Richard Bach

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. — Richard Bach

Reality is divinely indifferent. — Richard Bach

Tell him I said that he will know when he's my age that books aren't written on whims or old promises. Books are written on years turned inside out by ideas that never let go until you get them in print, and even then writing's a last resort, a desperate ransom you pay to get your life back. — Richard Bach

I'm a writer as rarely as possible, when forced by an idea too lovely to let die unwritten — Richard Bach

Your life is a treasure and you are so much more than you know. — Richard Bach

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. — Richard Bach

Jonathan sighed. The price of being misunderstood, he thought. They call you devil or they call you god. — Richard Bach

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

We can start working with time, if you wish, 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 — Richard Bach

The only true law is that which leads to freedom, — Richard Bach

One must first learn to fall if one would fly ... — Richard Bach

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. — Richard Bach

The more I want to get something done the less I call it work. — Richard Bach

Navigate by the same star, unwilling to change, and you find yourself not only off-course but lost. — Richard Bach

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. — Richard Bach

I don't want to do business with those who don't make a profit, because they can't give the best service. — Richard Bach

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

As long as we believe in sequential time, we see becoming instead of being. Beyond time, we are all one. — Richard Bach

I think our learning lies along the path of whatever it is we love. — Richard Bach

Argue for your limitations and, sure enough, they're yours. — Richard Bach

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. — Richard Bach

In every disaster, in every blessing, ask, "Why me?" There's a reason, of course, there's an answer. — Richard Bach

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. — Richard Bach

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. — Richard Bach

I gave my life to become the person I am right now. Was it worth it? — Richard Bach

Can miles truly separate us from friends? If you want to be with Rae, aren't you already there? — Richard Bach

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? — Richard Bach

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. — Richard Bach

Compelling reason will never convince blinding emotion. — Richard Bach

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. — Richard Bach

Mine's a free life, but it does get lonely sometimes. — Richard Bach

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

Remember where you came from, where you're going, and why you created this mess you got yourself into in the first place. — Richard Bach

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. — Richard Bach

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 ... — Richard Bach

If we don't accept any common beliefs, we can't exist in spacetime. But when we don't believe in age, at least we don't have to die because our numbers change. [ ... ] When you don't believe in birthdays, the idea of aging turns a little foreign to you. You don't fall into trauma over your sixteenth birthday or your thirtieth or the big Five-Oh or the deadly Century. You measure your life by what you learn, not by counting how many calendars you've seen. If you're going to have trauma, better it be the shock of discovering the fundamental principle of the universe that some date predictable as next July. — Richard Bach

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

In order to win, you must expect to win. — Richard Bach

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. — Richard Bach

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. — Richard Bach

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

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

For most gulls it was not flying that matters, but eating. For this gull, though, it was not eating that mattered, but flight. — Richard Bach

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. — Richard Bach

This is a test to see if your mission in this life is complete, if you are alive, it isn't. — Richard Bach

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. — Richard Bach

Like attracts like. 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. — Richard Bach

Let's begin with Level Flight. . . . — Richard Bach

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. — Richard Bach

I do not exist to impress the world. I exist to live my life in a way that will make me happy. — Richard Bach

Nobody comes to Earth to dodge problems. We come here to take 'em on. — Richard Bach

Did you ever feel that you were missing someone you had never met? — Richard Bach

Everything in this book may be wrong. — Richard Bach

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. — Richard Bach

There's no disaster that can't become a blessing, and no blessing that can't become a disaster. — Richard Bach

An author is a writer who didn't give up. — Richard Bach

Not being known doesn't stop the truth from being true. — Richard Bach

The only thing that shatters dreams is compromise. — Richard Bach

I want to go back to the Flock, of course. I've barely begun with the new group! — Richard Bach

The only way to avoid all frightening choices is to leave society and become a hermit, and that is a frightening choice. — Richard Bach

Sense of family is enormously important to me. In the larger sense, we're all of us family; we're all of us soulmates. — Richard Bach

Your conscience is the measure of the honesty of your selfishness.
Listen to it carefully. — Richard Bach

Believe you know all the answers, and you know all the answers. Believe you're a master, and you are. — Richard Bach

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. — Richard Bach

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. — Richard Bach

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. — Richard Bach

The gull sees farthest who flies highest — Richard Bach

Reality lies far beyond space and time, and I need to know why. — Richard Bach

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

Children are not our property, and they are not ours to control any more that we were our parents' property or theirs to control. — Richard Bach

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. — Richard Bach

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. — Richard Bach

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

Same with anyone who's been flying for years and loves it still ... we're part of a world we deeply love. Just as musicians feel about scores and melodies, dancers about the steps and flow of music, so we're one with the principle of flight, the magic of being aloft in the wind! — Richard Bach

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. — Richard Bach

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? — Richard Bach

The river delights to lift us free, if only we dare let go. — Richard Bach

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. — Richard Bach

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. — Richard Bach

Sometimes when learning comes before experience It doesn't make sense right away. — Richard Bach

We know nothing until intuition agrees. — Richard Bach

Finally I came to think that may be everything we need to know,ever,about anything,is already within us,waiting till we call for it. — Richard Bach

Life is the unknown and the unknowable, except that we are put into this world to eat, to stay alive as lone as we possibly can. — Richard Bach

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? — Richard Bach

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. — Richard Bach

What about everybody else Pye? How many lives can there be in one universe?'[ ... ] 'How many lives Richard?'[ ... ]'One.'. — Richard Bach

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. — Richard Bach

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'. — Richard Bach

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. — Richard Bach

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

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. — Richard Bach

Can miles truly separate you from friends ... If you want to be with someone you love, aren't you already there? — Richard Bach

If perfection is stagnation, then Heaven is a swamp. — Richard Bach