I hope you find what you are looking for. And maybe discover something you had no idea about!
There are 34 quotes matching Charles Lindbergh in the collection:
Trees become bushes; barns, toys; cows turn into rabbits as we climb. I lose all conscious connection with the past. I live only in the moment in this strange, unmortal space, crowded with beauty, pierced with danger. The horizon retreats, and veils itself in haze. The great, squared fields of Nebraska become patchwork on a planet’s disk.
Charles Lindbergh
The Spirit of St. Louis, 1953.
These phantoms speak with human voices — friendly, vapor-like shapes, without substance, able to vanish or appear at will, to pass in and out through the walls of the fuselage as though no walls were there … familiar voices, conversing and advising on my flight, discussing problems of my navigation, reassuring me, giving me messages of importance unattainable in ordinary life.
Charles Lindbergh
Writing about his first solo flight across the Atlantic. The Spirit of St. Louis, 1953.
I learned that danger is relative, and the inexperience can be a magnifying glass.
Charles Lindbergh
The Spirit of St. Louis, 1953.
Not so long ago, when I was a student in college, just flying an airplane seemed a dream. But that dream turned into reality.
Charles A. Lindbergh
Beginning his autobiography, The Spirit of St. Louis, 1953.
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 A. Lindbergh
The Spirit of St. Louis, 1953.
Planes may even replace automobiles someday, just as automobiles replaced horses. Possibly everyone will travel by air in another fifty years. I’m not sure I like the idea of millions of planes flying around overhead. I love the sky's unbroken solitude. I don’t like to think of it cluttered up by aircraft, as roads are cluttered up by cars. I feel like the western pioneer when he saw barbed-wire fence lines encroaching on his open plains. The success of his venture brought the end of the life he loved.
Charles Lindbergh
The Spirit of St. Louis, 1953.
I watched him strap on his harness and helmet, climb into the cockpit and, minutes later, a black dot falls off the wing two thousand feet above our field. At almost the same instant, a while streak behind him flowered out into the delicate wavering muslin of a parachute — a few gossamer yards grasping onto air and suspending below them, with invisible threads, a human life, and man who by stitches, cloth, and cord, had made himself a god of the sky for those immortal moments.
A day or two later, when I decided that I too must pass through the experience of a parachute jump, life rose to a higher level, to a sort of exhilarated calmness. The thought of crawling out onto the struts and wires hundreds of feet above the earth, and then giving up even that tenuous hold of safety and of substance, left me a feeling of anticipation mixed with dread, of confidence restrained by caution, of courage salted through with fear. How tightly should one hold onto life? How loosely give it rein? What gain was there for such a risk? I would have to pay in money for hurling my body into space. There would be no crowd to watch and applaud my landing. Nor was there any scientific objective to be gained. No, there was deeper reason for wanting to jump, a desire I could not explain.
It was that quality that led me into aviation in the first place — it was a love of the air and sky and flying, the lure of adventure, the appreciation of beauty. It lay beyond the descriptive words of man — where immortality is touched through danger, where life meets death on equal plane; where man is more than man, and existence both supreme and valueless at the same instant.
Charles Lindbergh
Contemplating his first parachute jump, The Spirit of St. Louis, 1953.
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 the sheer love of the life I lead.
Charles Lindbergh
The Spirit of St. Louis, 1953.
Lying under an acacia tree with the sound of the dawn around me, I realized more clearly the facts that man should never overlook: that the construction of an airplane, for instance, is simple when compared [with] a bird; that airplanes depend on an advanced civilization, and that were civilization is most advanced, few birds exist. I realized that If I had to choose, I would rather have birds than airplanes.
Charles Lindbergh
During a trip to Africa. Is Civilization Progress?, in Reader’s Digest, July 1964. Quoted in his New York Times obituary, 27 August 1974.
But I have seen the science I worshiped, and the airplane I loved, destroying the civilization I expected them to serve.
Charles Lindbergh
Time magazine, 26 May 1967.
Charles A. Lindbergh
Born 1902, Michigan
Died 1974, Maui
“… If I take the wings of the morning,
and dwell in the innermost parts of the sea …”
C. A. L.
The unadorned flat-to-the-ground gravestone of Charles A. Lindbergh
He died of cancer on the island of Maui, Hawaii, on 26 August 1974. He was buried three hours later in simple work clothes. The quote is from Psalms 139:9-10.
Whether outwardly or inwardly, whether in space or time, the farther we penetrate the unknown, the vaster and more marvelous it becomes.
Charles Lindbergh
Autobiography of Values, 1977.
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
Charles Lindbergh, Craftsman, 15 May 1977. In The pursuit of Happiness, and Other Sobering Thoughts, 1978.
The first company to produce a certified two seat electric aircraft with a 1.5 hour range will dominate the aviation training market.
Erik Lindbergh
Grandson of Charles Lindbergh and on the board of the X Prize Foundation, 29 September 2011.
Don’t see what you were looking for? Try the home page, or do a super search: