Lindbergh Quotes & Sayings

Failures aren't failures if you learn something from them ... — Anne Morrow Lindbergh

In honoring the Wright Brothers, it is customary and proper to recognize their contribution to scientific progress. But I believe it is equally important to emphasize the qualities in their pioneering life and the character in man that such a life produced. The Wright Brothers balanced success with modesty, science with simplicity. At Kitty Hawk their intellects and senses worked in mutual support. They represented man in balance, and from that balance came wings to lift a world. — Charles A. Lindbergh

At whatever point one opens Gift from the Sea, to any chapter or page, the author's words offer a chance to breathe and to live more slowly. The book makes it possible to quiet down and rest in the present, no matter what the circumstances may be. Just to read it - a little of it or in its entirety - is to exist for a while in a different and more peaceful tempo. Even the sway and flow of language and cadence seem to me to make reference to the easy, inevitable movements of the sea. — Anne Morrow Lindbergh

If I must fight, I'll fight; but I prefer not to spit at my enemy beforehand. — Charles Lindbergh

Aviation has struck a delicately balanced world, a world where stability was already giving way to the pressure of new dynamic forces, a world dominated by a mechanical, materialist,
Western European civilization. — Charles Lindbergh

Fear presides over these memories, a perpetual fear.Of course no childhood is without its terrors, yet I wonder if I would have been a less frightened boy if Lindbergh hadn't been president or if I hadn't been the offspring of Jews. — Philip Roth

Seems to me the most beautiful thing on earth, perhaps because it is unearthly, and the touch of God in us: the miracle of mercy, the unexpected, the arms of the prodigal son's father, the ravens bringing food in the night, the cup running over. — Anne Morrow Lindbergh

The present is passed over in the race for the future; the here is neglected in favor of the there. Enjoy the moment, even if it means merely a walk in the country. — Anne Morrow Lindbergh

But I want first of all- in fact, as an end to these other desires- to be at peace with myself. — Anne Morrow Lindbergh

Aviation constituted a new and possibly decisive element in preventing or fighting a war, and I was in a unique position to observe European aviation - especially in its military aspects. — Charles Lindbergh

The punctuation of anniversaries is terrible, like the closing of doors, one after another between you and what you want to hold on to. — Anne Morrow Lindbergh

A day out of season, stopping the monotonous count of summer days. Stopping, too, one's own summer routine, so that, looking out on the gray skies, one says not only, 'What time of year is it?' but, 'What time of life am I in? Where am I? What am I doing? — Anne Morrow Lindbergh

People don't want to be understood - I mean not completely. It's too destructive. Then they haven't anything left. They don't want complete sympathy or complete understanding. They want to be treated carelessly and taken for granted lots of times. — Anne Morrow Lindbergh

God often used bitter experiences to make us better. Gold can be a helpful servant, but a cruel master. — Anne Morrow Lindbergh

I want first of all - in fact, as an end to these other desires - to be at peace with myself. I want a singleness of eye, a purity of intention, a central cor to my life that will enable me to carry out these obligations and activities as well as I can. I want, in fact - to borrow from the language of the saints -to live 'in grace' as much of the time as possible. I am not using this term in a strictly theological sense. By grace I mean an inner harmony, essentially spiritual, which can be translated into outward harmony ... — Anne Morrow Lindbergh

If I take the wings of the morning and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea ... — Anne Morrow Lindbergh

When we start at the center of ourselves, we discover something worthwhile extending toward the periphery of the circle. We find again some of the joy in the now, some of the peace in the here, some of the love in me and thee which go to make up the kingdom of heaven on earth. — Anne Morrow Lindbergh

Geniuses were like storms or cyclones, pulling everything into their path, sticks and stones and dust. — Anne Morrow Lindbergh

Your inspiration is better if it comes from many different sources and your sensibilities will transform all those influences and inspiration into your own visual world. It's like reading the book instead of watching the movie. — Peter Lindbergh

We must limit to a reasonable amount the Jewish influence ... Whenever the Jewish percentage of total population becomes too high, a reaction seems to invariably occur. It is too bad because a few Jews of the right type are, I believe, an asset to any country. — Charles Lindbergh

Even if America entered the war, it is improbable that the Allied armies could invade Europe and overwhelm the Axis powers. But one thing is certain. If England can draw this country into the war, she can shift to our shoulders a large portion of the responsibility for waging it and for paying its cost. — Charles Lindbergh

After 'Lindbergh,' my publisher asked whom I wanted to write about next. I said, 'There's one idea I've been carrying in my hip pocket for 35 years. It's Woodrow Wilson.' — A. Scott Berg

It was over in a blink of an eye, that moment when aviation stirred the modern imagination. Aviation was transformed from recklessness to routine in Lindbergh's lifetime. Today the riskiest part of air travel is the drive to the airport, and the airlines use a barrage of stimuli to protect passengers from ennui. — George Will

Under the federal reserve act, panics are scientifically created. The present panic is the first scientifically created one, worked out as we figured, a mathematical equation. — Charles Lindbergh

I grow aware of various forms of man and of myself. I am form and I am formless, I am life and I am matter, mortal and immortal. I am one and many
myself and humanity in flux. — Charles Lindbergh

No right of preference exists in favor of person, property, or business. Personal claims and ambitions must yield in favor of whatever best serves the general welfare. — Charles Lindbergh

The collector walks with blinders on; he sees nothing but the prize. — Anne Morrow Lindbergh

We can so reconstruct society that it will be self-perpetuating instead of as now, self-exhaustive. — Charles Lindbergh

Whatever a man imagines he can attain, if he doesn't become too arrogant and encroach on the rights of the gods. — Charles Lindbergh

I hope you either take up parachute jumping or stay out of single motored airplanes at night. — Charles Lindbergh

Why does one want to walk wings? Why force one's body from a plane to make a parachute jump? Why should man want to fly at all? People often ask these questions. But what civilization was not founded on adventure, and how long could one exist without it? Some answer the attainment of knowledge. Some say wealth, or power, is sufficient cause. I believe the risks I take are justified y the sheer love of the life I lead. — Charles Lindbergh

The beach is not a place to work; to read, write or to think. — Anne Morrow Lindbergh

Now there is this whole terror about getting old. Today, that fascination with youth is overrated. What's so special about being young? I just say that because I'm old. — Peter Lindbergh

One longs to explain, to be sure they understand, the people one loves. — Anne Morrow Lindbergh

Communication with another person
wasn't it the realest thing in life? — Anne Morrow Lindbergh

For a long time, I'd been vaguely fascinated by the idea that Charles Lindbergh flew the Atlantic and Babe Ruth hit 60 home runs in the same summer. — Bill Bryson

Accuracy means something to me. It's vital to my sense of values. I've learned not to trust people who are inaccurate. Every aviator knows that if mechanics are inaccurate, aircraft crash. If pilots are inaccurate, they get lost-sometimes killed. In my profession life itself depends on accuracy. — Charles Lindbergh

I am shocked at the attitude of our American troops. They have no respect for death, the courage of an enemy soldier, or many of the ordinary decencies of life. — Charles Lindbergh

Sometimes, flying feels too godlike to be attained by man. Sometimes, the world from above seems too beautiful, too wonderful, too distant for human eyes to see . — Charles Lindbergh

And then, some morning in the second week, the mind wakes, comes to life again. Not in a city sense - no - but beach-wise. It begins to drift, to play, to turn over in gentle careless rolls like those lazy waves on the beach. One never knows what chance treasures these easy unconscious rollers may toss up, on the smooth white sand of the conscious mind; what perfectly rounded stone, what rare shell from the ocean floor. Perhaps a channeled whelk, a moon shell, or even an argonaut. — Anne Morrow Lindbergh

The desire forcontinuity of being-loved-alone seems to me "the error bred in the bone" of man. For "there is no one-and-only, as a friend of mine once said in a similar discussion, "there are just one-and-only moments. — Anne Morrow Lindbergh

To go somewhere where nobody knows you, and to keep your eyes open ... That was a beautiful concept in terms of putting yourself in a place to be inspired. — Peter Lindbergh

To hear, in the short space of one week, a Scottish terrier booed by an audience and President Roosevelt criticized by Charles Lindbergh was a great strain on our nerves. The props of life seem to be crumbling fast. — E.B. White

I can conceive of 'falling in love' over and over again. But 'marriage,' this richness of life itself, I cannot conceive of having again - or with anyone else. In this sense 'marriage' seems to me indissoluble. — Anne Morrow Lindbergh

I didn't take inspiration from other photographers, which in a way helped to find my own images. — Peter Lindbergh

I had four sandwiches when I left New York. I only ate one and a half during the whole trip and drank a little water. I don't suppose I had time to eat any more because, you know, it surprised me how short a distance it is to Europe. — Charles Lindbergh

The greatest danger to this country lies in their large ownership and influence in our motion pictures, our press, our radio and our government. — Charles Lindbergh

For sleep, one needs endless depths of blackness to sink into; daylight is too shallow, it will not cover one. — Anne Morrow Lindbergh

Here was a place where men and life and death had reached the lowest form of degradation. How could any reward in national progress even faintly justify the establishment and operation of
such a place? — Charles Lindbergh

Is he alone who has courage on his right hand and faith on his left hand? — Charles Lindbergh

Yesterday I sat in a field of violets for a long time perfectly still, until I really sank into it - into the rhythm of the place, I mean - then when I got up to go home I couldn't walk quickly or evenly because I was still in time with the field. — Anne Morrow Lindbergh

I walked far down the beach, soothed by the rhythm of the waves, the sun on my bare back and legs, the wind and mist from the spray on my hair. — Anne Morrow Lindbergh

Perhaps this is the most important thing for me to take back from beach-living: simply the memory that each cycle of the tide is valid; each cycle of the wave is valid; each cycle of a relationship is valid. — Anne Morrow Lindbergh

One cannot collect all the beautiful shells on the beach. — Anne Morrow Lindbergh

There's something else that makes a woman interesting, something beyond being young or being old. And I'm going to find out what that something else is before I die, I hope. — Peter Lindbergh

We must re-learn to be alone. — Ann Morrow Lindbergh

These values are signposts toward another way of living: simplicity of living, as much as possible, to retain a true awareness of life; balance of physical, intellectual, and spiritual life; work without pressure; space for significance and beauty; time for solitude and sharing; closeness to nature to strengthen understanding and faith in the intermittency of life. — Anne Morrow Lindbergh

Tragedy is the common lot of man. 'So many people have lost children' I remind myself. pp 178-179
This tragedy is such an inextricable part of my story that it cannot be left out of an honest record. Suffering - no matter how multiplied - is always individual. p 179 — Anne Morrow Lindbergh

Woman can best refind herself by losing herself in some kind of creative activity of her own. Here she will be able to refind her strength, the strength she needs to look and work at the second half of the problem - the neglected pure relationship. Only a refound person can refind a personal relationship. — Anne Morrow Lindbergh

Milky and opaque, it has the pinkish bloom of the sky on a summer evening, ripening to rain. — Anne Morrow Lindbergh

Travelers are always discoverers, especially those who travel by air. There are no signposts in the sky to show a man has passed that way before. There are no channels marked. The flier breaks each second into new uncharted seas. — Anne Morrow Lindbergh

Ideally, both members of a couple in love free each other to new and different worlds. — Anne Morrow Lindbergh

My first obsession was actually sports. I was a very good handball goalkeeper. With special permission, I played in the premier league in Germany before I was even old enough. — Peter Lindbergh

We have had three appalling weeks, the kind one hardly believes while one is going through it. And afterwards, as now, it seems quite unbelievable - except for the inexplicable weariness. Written down it sounds merely funny. — Anne Morrow Lindbergh

Duration is not a test of truth or falsehood. — Anne Morrow Lindbergh

We are in the grip of a scientific materialism, caught in a vicious cycle where our security today seems to depend on regimentation and weapons which will ruin us tomorrow. — Charles Lindbergh

I begin to shed my Martha-like anxiety about many things. Washable slipcovers, faded and old - I hardly see them; I don't worry about the impression they make on other people. I am shedding pride. — Anne Morrow Lindbergh

The here, the now and the individual have always been the special concern of the saint, the artist, the poet and
from time immemorial
the woman. — Anne Morrow Lindbergh

If Charles Lindbergh, flying with no instruments other than a bologna sandwich, managed to cross the Atlantic and land safely on a runway completely covered with French people, why are today's airplanes, which are equipped with radar and computers and individualized liquor bottles, unable to cope with fog? — Dave Barry

To mention a loved object, a person, or a place to someone else is to invest that object with reality. — Anne Morrow Lindbergh

We are all consumers and should all be producers. — Charles Lindbergh

There is no aristocracy of grief. Grief is a great leveler. — Anne Morrow Lindbergh

Can you write a book and have children at the same time? Yes, if you're content to do it very very slowly. — Anne Morrow Lindbergh

Kidney transplants seem so routine now. But the first one was like Lindbergh's flight across the ocean. — Joseph Murray

The photographer, even in fashion and portraiture, has to have a standpoint. It's important to know what you stand for, no? Most people just take pictures, but they stand for nothing. They follow trends and don't know why. — Peter Lindbergh

For relationships, too, must be like islands. One must accept them for what they are here and now, within their limits - islands surrounded and interrupted by the sea, continuously visited and abandoned by the tides. One must accept the serenity of the winged life, of ebb and flow, of intermittency. — Anne Morrow Lindbergh

Lindbergh expressed these thoughts in a splendid speech while accepting the Wright Brothers Memorial Trophy at the Washington Aero Club in January 1946. Titling his speech "Honoring the Wright Brothers," he took as his theme "the way in which science was divorcing man from his old sense of independence and moral values."16 — Winston Groom

I had the feeling, when the thoughts first clarified on paper, that my experience was very different from other people's. (Are we all under this illusion?) — Anne Morrow Lindbergh

It's as if you've been walking against a great wind all your life, and then the wind is gone, and you can't walk. — Anne Morrow Lindbergh

You can't just write and write and put things in a drawer. They wither without the warm sun of someone else's appreciation. — Anne Morrow Lindbergh

One comes in the end to realize that there is no permanent pure-relationship and there should not be. It is not even something to be desired. The pure relationship is limited, in space and in time. In its essence it implies exclusion. It excludes the rest of life, other relationships, other sides of personality, other responsibilities, other possibilities in the future. It excludes growth. — Anne Morrow Lindbergh

People "died" all the time ... Parts of them died when they made the wrong kinds of decisions-decisions against life. Sometimes they died bit by bit until finally they were just living corpses walking around. If you were perceptive you could see it in their eyes; the fire had gone out ... you always knew when you made a decision against life. The door clicked and you were safe inside-safe and dead. — Anne Morrow Lindbergh

Civilization must be based on life. We should never forget that human life was created in and for millions of centuries, was nourished by primitive wildness. We cannot separate ourselves from this ancestral background. — Charles Lindbergh

Is cruelty a moral judgment if it is fundamental to forms of life? Who is man to say that the workings of nature, and therefore of the divine plan of which he himself is part, are cruel? — Charles Lindbergh

Is civilization progress? The challenge, I think, is clear; and, as clearly, the final answer will be given not by our amassing of knowledge, or by the discoveries of our science, or by the speed of our aircraft, but by the effect of our civilized activities as a whole have upon the quality of our planet's life-the life of plants and animals as that of men. — Charles Lindbergh

We Americans, with our terrific emphasis on youth, action, and material success, certainly tend to belittle the afternoon of life and even to pretend it never comes. We push the clock back and try to prolong the morning, over-reaching and over-straining ourselves in the unnatural effort ... In our breathless attempts we often miss the flowering that waits for afternoon. — Anne Morrow Lindbergh

Peace is a virgin who dare not show her face without Strength, her father, for protection. — Charles Lindbergh

Lindbergh knew perfectly well what modern bombs could do to cities but, seeing Nazi Germany for the first time, the idea of a new and very dangerous war became real to him. — Winston Groom

No American can understand the need for time
that is, simply space to breathe. If you have ten minutes to spare you should jam that full instead of leaving it
as space around your next ten minutes. How can anything ripen without those 'empty' ten minutes? — Anne Morrow Lindbergh

Women need solitude in order to find again the true essence of themselves. — Anne Morrow Lindbergh

We insist on permanency, on continuity, when the only continuity possible is in growth, in freedom, in the sense that the dancers are free, barely touching as they pass but partners in the same pattern. The only real security in a relationship lies neither in looking back in nostalgia, nor forward with dread or anticipation, but living in the present and accepting the relationship as it is now. — Anne Morrow Lindbergh

Good communication is as stimulating as black coffee and just as hard to sleep after. — Anne Morrow Lindbergh

On February 8, 1928, known as Lindbergh day since it was the day he crossed the Atlantic Ocean the year before, Charles A. Lindbergh landed at the Campo Columbia airfield near Havana. Lindbergh had visited many countries in his plane, and he had the national flags of each country painted in the fuselage. Having flown from Haiti, on a Goodwill Tour of the Caribbean in his "Spirit of St. Louis," he had the Cuban flag painted on his a single-engine Ryan monoplane. It was the last country he visited before he donated the "Spirit of St. Louis" to the Smithsonian Institution, where it is still exhibited at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C. — Hank Bracker

Yesterday's fairy tale is today's fact. The magician is only one step ahead of his audience. — Anne Morrow Lindbergh

In the sheltered simplicity of the first days after a baby is born, one sees again the magical closed circle, the miraculous sense of two people existing only for each other. — Anne Morrow Lindbergh

And if at times you renounce experience and mind's heavy logic, it seems that the world has rushed along on its orbit, leaving you alone flying above a forgotten cloud bank, somewhere in the solitude of interstellar space. — Charles Lindbergh

If it is a woman's function to give, she must be replenished, too. — Anne Morrow Lindbergh

One cannot dance well unless one is completely in time with the music, not leaning back to the last step or pressing forward to the next one, but poised directly on the present step as it comes. — Anne Morrow Lindbergh

Beauty cannot disguise nor music melt A pain undiagnosable but felt. — Anne Morrow Lindbergh

All living relationships are in process of
change, of expansion, and must perpetually be building themselves new forms. But there is no single
fixed form to express such a changing relationship. — Anne Morrow Lindbergh