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There are 23 quotes matching Richard Bach in the collection:
Real flight, my friend taught me, is the spirit of an airplane lifting the spirit of its pilot into the high clean blue of the sky, where they join to share the freedom.
Richard Bach
In the first article he ever had published, an unsolicited submission to Air Facts magazine they bought for $25. “My friend” was an Air Force T-33 jet trainer. Voice in the Dark, Air Facts magazine, September 1960.
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, 1970. This is the line as it appears in the book. But this gull was first seen in the 1967 Private Pilot magazine article (Vol 3, No 3, December) Jonathan Livingston Seagull: A Story. In that telling Bach wrote:
Most gulls don’t bother to learn more than the bare essentials of flight; how to get from shore to food and back again. For them, it is not the flying that matters, but food. For Jonathan Livingston Seagull, however, it was not the food that mattered, but flying. 
Bach was paid $200 for the article. It stuck a chord, and the magazine asked for and printed two more Jonathan stories. The article was also reprinted in the February 1968 edition of Soaring magazine.
There, readers voted it the “runaway winner” for most enjoyable piece of the year. It was all so popular that 'Dick' wrote more, like The Return of Jonathan Livingston Seagull, in the June 1968 Private Pilot and January 1969 Soaring.
He shopped a longer version of the articles, now with an ending, as a book to several publishers. But was rejected many times. Macmillan published the small book with lots of black and white photos in 1970 with a first printing of 7,500 copies. By April 1973 it had already reached 27 printings with over two million copies sold. Then it was released in paperback. There was a movie. And it continued on to become one of the most influential books of the 1970’s.
Why fly? Simple. I’m not happy unless there's some air between me and the ground.
Richard Bach
Quoted as coming from “An airline captain, touching up the wing of his homebuilt racer with a miniature paint bottle and a tiny brush,” in People Who Fly, originally published in Air Facts magazine, November 1960, and included in his 1974 book A Gift of Wings.
Flying prevails whenever a man and his airplane are put to a test of maximum performance.
Richard Bach
A Gift of Wings, 1974
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, 1963.
The man who flies an airplane, then, to be the best possible pilot, must be a believer in the unseen.
Richard Bach
Biplane, 1966.
“To fly as fast as thought, to anywhere that is,” he said, “you must begin by knowing that you have already arrived ...”
Richard Bach
Jonathan Livingston Seagull, 1970.
We thought humble and proud at the same time, all at once in love again with this painful bittersweet lovely thing called flight.
Richard Bach
A Gift of Wings, 1974
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
Biplane, 1966.
Flyers have a sense of adventures yet to come, instead of dimly recalling adventures of long ago as the only moments in which they truly lived.
Richard Bach
A Gift of Wings, 1974.
The highest art form of all is a human being in control of himself and his airplane in flight, urging the spirit of a machine to match his own.
Richard Bach
A Gift Of Wings, 1974.
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: An Adventure of the Spirit, 1994. Daisy was Richard’s Cessna 337.
Flyers fell a certain kinship with the sight of the earth unencrusted by humanity, they want to see it that way in one sweeping view, in reassurance that nature still exists on her own, without a chain-link fence to hold her.
Richard Bach
A Gift Of Wings, 1974.
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.
Richard Bach
Stranger to the Ground, 1963.
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, 1970.
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, 1970.
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
Hypnotizing Maria, 2009.
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 destructible.
Richard Bach
Nothing by Chance, 1969.
Never stop being a kid, Richard. Never stop tasting and feeling and seeing and being excited with great things like air and engines and the sounds of sunlight within you. Wear your little mask, if you must, to protect the kid from the world, but if you let that kid disappear, buddy, you are grown up and you are dead.
Richard Bach
Nothing by Chance, 1969.
He moves not through distance, but through the ranges of satisfaction that come from hauling himself up into the air with complete and utter control; from knowing himself and knowing his airplane so well that he can come somewhere close to touching, in his own special and solitary way, that thing that is called perfection.
Richard Bach
A Gift of Wings, 1974.
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