-- Plato, 'Phaedrus.'

When once you have tasted flight, you will forever walk the earth with your eyes turned skyward, for there you have been, and there you will always long to return.

-- Leonardo da Vinci

Pilots take no special joy in walking. Pilots like flying.

-- Neil Armstrong

The most beautiful dream that has haunted the heart of man since Icarus is today reality.

-- Louis Bleriot

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.

-- Richard Bach, 'Jonathan Livingston Seagull'

It's wonderful to climb the liquid mountains of the sky, Behind me and before me is God and I have no fears.

-- Helen Keller, at age 74, on flight around the world, news reports of 5 February 1955.

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

-- Richard Bach, 'Stranger to the Ground.'

Instead of our drab slogging forth and back to the fishing boats, there's a reason to life! We can lift ourselves out of ignorance, we can find ourselves as creatures of excellence and intelligence and skill. We can be free! We can learn to fly!

-- Richard Bach, 'Jonathan Livingston Seagull.'

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.

-- Richard Bach, 'Nothing by Chance.'

Lovers of air travel find it exhilarating to hang poised between the illusion of immortality and the fact of death.

-- Alexander Chase, 'Perspectives,' 1966

Science, freedom, beauty, adventure: what more could you ask of life? Aviation combined all the elements I loved. There was science in each curve of an airfoil, in each angle between strut and wire, in the gap of a spark plug or the color of the exhaust flame. There was freedom in the unlimited horizon, on the open fields where one landed. A pilot was surrounded by beauty of earth and sky. He brushed treetops with the birds, leapt valleys and rivers, explored the cloud canyons he had gazed at as a child. Adventure lay in each puff of wind.

I began to feel that I lived on a higher plane than the skeptics of the ground; one that was richer because of its very association with the element of danger they dreaded, because it was freer of the earth to which they were bound. In flying, I tasted a wine of the gods of which they could know nothing. Who valued life more highly, the aviators who spent it on the art they loved, or these misers who doled it out like pennies through their antlike days? I decided that if I could fly for ten years before I was killed in a crash, it would be a worthwhile trade for an ordinary life time.

-- Charles A. Lindbergh, 'The Spirit of St. Louis.'

I fly because it releases my mind from the tyranny of petty things . . .

-- Antoine de St-Exupéry

To put your life in danger from time to time... breeds a saneness in dealing with day-to-day trivialities.

-- Nevil Shute, 'Slide Rule'.

What can you conceive more silly and extravagant than to suppose a man racking his brains, and studying night and day how to fly?

-- William Law, 'A Serious Call to a Devout and Holly Life XI,' 1728.

Flying. Whatever any other organism has been able to do man should surely be able to do also, though he may go a different way about it.

-- Samuel Butler

How posterity will laugh at us, one way or other! If half a dozen break their necks, and balloonism is exploded, we shall be called fools for having imagined it could be brought to use: if it should be turned to account, we shall be ridiculed for having doubted.

-- Horace Walpole, letter to Horace Mann, 24 June 1785.

The airplane has unveiled for us the true face of the earth.

-- Antoine de St-Exupéry, 'Wind Sand, and Stars.'

The modern airplane creates a new geographical dimension. A navigable ocean of air blankets the whole surface of the globe. There are no distant places any longer: the world is small and the world is one.

-- Wendell Willkie

We want the air to unite the peoples, and not to divide them.

-- Lord Swinton

Unlike the boundaries of the sea by the shorelines, the "ocean of air" laps at the border of every state, city, town and home throughout the world.

-- Welch Pogue

I've never known an industry that can get into people's blood the way aviation does.

-- Robert Six, founder of Continental Airlines.

Maybe it's sex appeal, but there's something about an airplane that drives investors crazy.

-- Alfred Kahn, the 'father of airline deregulation.'

whhheeeEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE! The scream of jet engines rises to a crescendo on the runways of the world. Every second, somewhere or other, a plane touches down, with a puff of smoke from scorched tyre rubber, or rises in the air, leaving a smear of black fumes dissolving in its wake. From space, the earth might look to a fanciful eye like a huge carousel, with planes instead of horses spinning round its circumference, up and down, up and down. Whhheeeeeeeeeee!

-- David Lodge

Dad, I left my heart up there.

-- Francis Gary Powers, CIA U-2 pilot shot down over the Soviet Union, describing his first flight at age 14.

As soon as we left the ground I knew I myself had to fly!

-- Amelia Earhart, after her first flight in an airplane, a ten minute sight-seeing trip over Los Angeles, 1920.

I wanted to go higher than Rockefeller Center, which was being erected across the street from Saks Fifth Avenue and was going to cut off my view of the sky. . . . Flying got into my soul instantly but the answer as to why must be found somewhere back in the mystic maze of my birth and childhood and the circumstances of my earlier life. Whatever I am is elemental and the beginnings of it all have their roots in Sawdust Road. I might have been born in a hovel, but I determined to travel with the wind and stars.

-- Jacqueline Cochran, 'The Stars at Noon,' 1954.

I could have gone on flying through space forever.

-- Major Yuri Gagarin, first man in space, quoted in 'The New York Times,' 14 April 1958.

I've had a ball.

-- Chuck Yeager, describing his 30 year Air Force career.

To invent an airplane is nothing. To build one is something. To fly is everything.

-- Otto Lilienthal

Aeronautics was neither an industry nor a science. It was a miracle.

-- Igor Sikorsky

You will begin to touch heaven, Jonathan, in the moment you touch the perfect speed. And that isn't flying a thousand miles an hour, or a million, of flying at the speed of light. Because any number is a limit, and perfect speed, my son, is being there.

-- Richard Bach, 'Jonathan Livingston Seagull'

There is no excuse for an airplane unless it will fly fast!

-- Roscoe Turner

Professor Focke and his technicians standing below grew ever smaller as I continued to rise straight up, 50 metres, 75 metres, 100 metres. Then I gently began to throttle back and the speed of ascent dwindled till I was hovering motionless in midair. This was intoxicating! I thought of the lark, so light and small of wing, hovering over the summer fields. Now man had wrested from him his lovely secret.

-- Hanna Reitch, German test pilot describing her first helicopter flight.

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, 'Running From Safety,' 1994. Daisy is Richard's Cessna 337

The engine is the heart of an aeroplane, but the pilot is its soul.

-- Sir Walter Raleigh

High sprits they had: gravity they flouted.

-- Cecil Day Lewis

This is all about fun. You can grab ahold of an airplane here, and literally take your life in both hands. One for the throttle and one for the stick, and you can control your own destiny, free of most rules and regulations. It may not be better than sex, but it's definitely better than the second time. Adrenaline is a narcotic; it may be a naturally induced narcotic, but it is a narcotic. And once you get it movin' around in there, it's a rush like none other, and when this puppy gets movin...

-- Alan Preston, air race pilot

Flying without feathers is not easy; my wings have no feathers.

-- Titus Maccius Plautus, 'Paenulus,' Act v, scene 2, circa 220 B.C. Original, "Sine pennis volare hau facilest: meae alea pennas non habent."

He rode upon a cherub, and did fly: yea, he did fly upon the wings of the wind.

-- Old Testament: Psalms XVIII, 10, circa 150 B.C.

The reason birds can fly and we can't is simply that they have perfect faith, for to have faith is to have wings.

-- Sir James Matthew Barrie

No bird ever flew nonstop from New York to Tokyo, or raced 15 miles high at triple the speed of sound. But birds do something else. They do not conquer the air; they romance it.

-- Peter Garrison

No bird soars too high, if he soars with his own wings.

-- William Blake

Fly and you will catch the swallow.

-- James Howell, 'Proverbs,' 1659.

Sometimes I feel a strange exhilaration up here which seems to come from something beyond the mere stimulus of flying. It is a feeling of belonging to the sky, of owning and being owned -- if only for a moment - by the air I breathe. It is akin to the well known claim of the swallow: each bird staking out his personal bug-strewn slice of heaven, his inviolate property of the blue.

-- Guy Murchie, 'Song of the Sky,' 1954.

Travelers are always discoverers, especially those who travel by air. There are no signposts in the air 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, 'North to the Orient,' 1935

. . . the fundamental magic of flying, a miracle that has nothing to do with any of its practical purposes -- purposes of speed, accessibility, and convenience -- and will not change as they change.

-- Anne Morrow Lindbergh, 'North to the Orient,' 1935

Flying is within our grasp. We have naught to do but take it.

-- Charles F. Duryea, 'Learning How to Fly,' Procedings of the Third International Conference on Aeronautics, 1894.

It will free man from the remaining chains, the chains of gravity which still tie him to this planet. It will open to him the gates of heaven.

-- Wernher von Braun, on the importance of space travel, 10 February 1958.

What is it that makes a man willing to sit up on top of an enormous Roman candle, such as a Redstone, Atlas, Titan or Saturn rocket, and wait for someone to light the fuse?

-- Tom Wolfe, 'The Right Stuff,' 1979.

It was quite a day. I don't know what you can say about a day when you see four beautiful sunsets. . . . This is a little unusual, I think.

-- John Glen, in 'American Chronicle,' Lois and Alan Gordon, 1962.

No need to teach an eagle to fly.

-- Greek Proverb

There is no flying without wings.

-- French Proverb

To most people, the sky is the limit. To those who love aviation, the sky is home.

-- anon.

If you are a woman, and are coming to the flying field seeking stimulation, excitement and flattery, you had better stay away until flying is a little bit safer. If you are thinking that flying will develop character; will teach you to be orderly, well-balanced; will give you an increasingly wider outlook; discipline you, and destroy vanity and pride; enable you to control yourself more and more under all conditions; to think less of yourself and your personal problems, and more of sublimity and everlasting peace that dwell serene in the heavens - if you seek these latter qualities, and think on them exclusively, why - FLY!

-- Margery Brown, 'Flying' magazine, 1929.

I learned to watch, to put my trust in other hands than mine. I learned to wander. I learned what every dreaming child needs to know -- that no horizon is so far that you cannot get above it or beyond it. These I learned at once. But most things come harder.

-- Beryl Markham, 'West with the Night.'

When I'm up in the air, it's like I'm closer to heaven; I can't explain the feeling.

-- Jeffrey Gagliano

To fly a kite is to hold God's hand.

-- Daniel C. Hawkins

They shall mount up on wings as eagles.

-- Isaiah 31.

Whether outwardly or inwardly, whether in space or time, the farther we penetrate the unknown, the vaster and more marvelous it becomes.

-- Charles A. Lindbergh, 'Autobiography of Values.'

A small machine is ideal for short flights, joy riding the heavens, or sight seeing among the clouds; but there is something more majestic and stable about the big bombers which a pilot begins to love. An exquisite community grows up between machine and pilot; each, as it were, merges into the other. The machine is rudimentary and the pilot the intellectual force. The levers and controls are the nervous system of the machine, through which the will of the pilot may be expressed-and expressed to an infinitely fine degree. A flying-machine is something entirely apart from and above all other contrivances of man's ingenuity.

The aeroplane is the nearest thing to animate life that man has created. In the air a machine ceases indeed to be a mere piece of mechanism; it becomes animate and is capable not only of primary guidance and control, but actually of expressing a pilot's temperament.

-- Sir Ross Smith, K.B.E., 'National Geographic Magazine,' March 1921.

Flying alone! Nothing gives such a sense of mastery over time over mechanism, mastery indeed over space, time, and life itself, as this.

-- Cecil Day Lewis

Until now I have never really lived! Life on earth is a creeping, crawling business. It is in the air that one feels the glory of being a man and of conquering the elements. There is an exquisite smoothness of motion and the joy of gliding through space. It is wonderful!

-- Gabriele D'Annunzio, 1909.

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.

-- Richard Bach.

I am alive. Up here with the song of the engine and the air whispering on my face as the sunlight and shadows play upon the banking, wheeling wings, I am completely, vibrantly alive. With the stick in my right hand, the throttle in my left, and the rudder beneath my feet, I can savor that essence from which life is made.

-- Steven Coonts, 'FLY! A Colorado Sunrise, A Stearman, and A Vision.'

He knew that we gave constant lip service to the dictates of safety and howled like Christians condemned to the arena if any compromise were made of it. He knew we were seekers after ease, suspicious, egotistic, and stubborn to a fault. He also knew that none of us would have continued our careers unless we had always been, and still were, helpless before this opportunity to take a chance.

-- Ernest K. Gann

It's the most exciting thing you have ever done with your pants on!

-- Stephen Coonts, 'Flight of the Intruder'

Air racing may not be better than your wedding night, but it's better than the second night.

-- Mickey Rupp, air racer and former Indianapolis 500 driver.

The man who flies an airplane ... must believe in the unseen.

-- Richard Bach

When we walk to the edge of all the light we have and take the step into the darkness of the unknown, we must believe that one of two things will happen. There will be something solid for us to stand on or we will be taught to fly.

-- Patrick Overton

Thou art an eagle, thou doest belong to the sky and not to the earth, stretch forth thy wings and fly.

-- Paul H Dunn

Oh, that I had wings like a dove, for then would I fly away, and be at rest.

-- Psalms 55:6

Somewhere, over the rainbow, bluebirds fly,
Birds fly over the rainbow, why then, oh why can't I?

-- lyrics from 'Somewhere Over the Rainbow,' sung in the movie 'The Wonderful Wizard of OZ' (1939) by Judy Garland.

Up in the sky, look! It's a bird! It's a plane! It's Superman!

-- The Narrator, in the movie 'Superman' (1941).

Caution: Cape does not enable user to fly.

-- Batman costume warning label, Wal-Mart, 1995.

I'm a new man. I go home exhilarated.

-- former President George Bush, after sky diving from 12,500 feet at age 72. March 1997.

It is appearances, characteristics and performance that make a man love an airplane, and they, told truly, are what put emotion into one. You love a lot of things if you live around them, but there isn't any woman and there isn't any horse, not any before nor any after, that is as lovely as a great airplane, and men who love them are faithful to them even though they leave them for others.

-- Ernest Hemingway

You can always tell when a man has lost his soul to flying. The poor bastard is hopelessly committed to stopping whatever he is doing long enough to look up and make sure the aircraft purring overhead continues on course and does not suddenly fall out of the sky. It is also his bound duty to watch every aircraft within view take off and land.

-- Ernest K Gann, 'Fate is the Hunter.'

[Flying fosters] fantasies of childhood, of omnipotence, rapid shifts of being, 'miraculous' moments; it stirs our capacity for dreaming.

-- Joyce Carol Oates, 'Coming Home,' USAir magazine, May 1995.

-- Richard Bach, 'Biplane,' 1966.

To fly! to live as airmen live! Like them to ride the skyways from horizon to horizon, across rivers and forests! To free oneself from the petty disputes of everyday life, to be active, to feel the blood renewed in one's vein -- ah! that is life. . . . Life in finer and simpler. My will is freer. I appreciate everything more, sunlight and shade, work and my friends. The sky is vast. I breathe deep gulps of the fine clear air of the heights. I feel myself to have achieved a higher state of physical strength and a clearer brain. I am living in the third dimension!

-- Henri Mignoet, 'L'Aviation de L'Amateur; Le Sport de l'Air,' 1934.