Richard Bach Quotes

The space for what you want is already filled with what you settled for instead.

In the path of our happiness shall we find the learning for which we have chosen this lifetime.

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.

You don't want a million answers as much as you want a few forever questions. The questions are diamonds you hold in the light. Study a lifetime and you see different colors from the same jewel.

Don't be dismayed by good-byes. A farewell is necessary before you can meet again. And meeting again, after moments or lifetimes, is certain for those who are friends.

You are always free to change your mind and choose a different future, or a different past.

Fly free and happy beyond birthdays and across forever, and we'll meet now and then when we wish, in the midst of the one celebration that never can end.

I think there's an invisible principle of living too. If we believe we're guided through every step of our lives, we are. It's a lovely sight, watching it work.

What matters is how I use what I know, every minute of every day; how I use it to remember, in the midst of the game.

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

No matter how qualified or deserving we are, we will never reach a better life until we can imagine it for ourselves and allow ourselves to have it.

Reputation is what people think you are. Character is who you really are. Take care of your character and your reputation will take care of itself. The more I want to get something done, the less I call it work.

Any powerful idea is absolutely fascinating and absolutely useless until we choose to use it.

Testing ourselves over and again, learning love and love and LOVE!

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

Everything is exactly as it is for a reason. The crumb on your table is no mystical reminder of this morning's cookie, it is there because you have chosen not to remove it. No exceptions.

Amazing. You were so attached to it, and it still disappeared for you." “Attached! I was whocking that cloud with everything I had! Fireballs, laser beams, vacuum cleaner a block high...” “Negative attachments, Richard. If you really want to remove a cloud from your life, you do not make a big production out of it, you just relax and remove it from your thinking. That’s all there is to it.

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.

One of the great cosmic laws, I think, is that whatever we hold in our thought will come true in our experience. When we hold something, anything, in our thought, then somehow coincidence leads us in the direction that we've been wishing to lead ourselves.

Those who win are those who think they can.

The world's crazy, when it comes to beauty.

He who argues for his limitations gets to keep them

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

Rarely do members of the same family grow up under the same roof.

A drug for everything is madness. Legal or not, prescribed or not, over-counter under-counter bought for blood on street-corners-every pill separates us from knowing our own completion and from being taught by what's true.

Within each of us lies the power of our consent to health and sickness, to riches and poverty, to freedom and to slavery. It is we who control these, and not another.

Flying prevails whenever a man and his airplane are put to a test of maximum performance.

So this world, I think, and an indefinite number of other worlds of our creation, are also - we're here for fun; we're here for learning; we're here for remembering who we are, and who we are, are expressions of life so absolutely linked with the life that is, always was, always will be.

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

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.

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

Why? What is so wonderful about mass murder that nobody in the history of the world has ever fond any smarter solution to problems than killing everybody who doesn’t agree? Is that the limit of human intelligence?

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.

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.

I have always wanted an adventurous life. It took a long time to realize that I was the only one who could make an adventurous life happen to me.

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.

You are led, when you share your loves, to an enchanted life of inner happiness, which unsharing others cannot know.

Every person, all the events of your life are there because you have drawn them there. What you choose to do with them is up to you.

Without my airplane I am an ordinary man, and a useless one - a trainer without a horse, a sculptor without marble, a priest without a god. Without an airplane I am a lonely consumer of hamburgers.

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

Build an inner place to protect your truth.

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.

If we believe that we're separated from someone, though they stand in the same room with us, we're separated. If we believe that we're together, if we believe that they are with us, if we listen through our inner senses, there's a chance we'll hear.

The only thing that shatters dreams is compromise.

Never stop being a kid, Richard. Never stop feeling and seeing and being excited with great things like air and engines and sounds of sunlight within you. Wear your little mask if you must to protect you from the world but if you let that kid disappear you are grown up and you are dead.

Real integrity is doing the right thing, knowing that nobody's going to know whether you did it or not. Sooner or later, those who win are those who think they can.

You are never given a wish without also being given the power to make it come true. You may have to work for it, however.

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