Richard Bach quotes:

The bond that links your true family is not one of blood, but of respect and joy in each other's life.

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.

True love stories never have endings.

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

What the caterpillar calls the end of the world the master calls a butterfly.

Your only obligation in any lifetime is to be true to yourself. Being true to anyone else or anything else is not only impossible, but the mark of a fake messiah.

The meaning I picked, the one that changed my life: Overcome fear, behold wonder.

Your friends will know you better in the first minute you meet than your acquaintances will know you in a thousand years.

Same with anyone who's been flying for years and loves it still... we're part of a world we deeply love. Just as musicians feel about scores and melodies, dancers about the steps and flow of music, so we're one with the principle of flight, the magic of being aloft in the wind!

I've owned 41 airplanes. A few of them would talk with me. This little seaplane, though, we've had long conversations in flight. There's a spirit in anything, I think, into which we weave our soul. Not many pilots talk about it, but they think about it in the quiet dark of a night flight.

The best way to pay for a lovely moment is to enjoy it.

Kindle Singles is publishing on skates. It prints like lightning; our book meets readers in hours. I've spent so many years waiting for publishers to consider whether they wanted to print a book of mine, making contracts, taking months to fit it into the Fall list or the Spring list, fitting it into an advertising plan.

Get this in mind early: We never grow up.

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.

It is by not always thinking of yourself, if you can manage it, that you might somehow be happy. Until you make room in your life for someone as important to you as yourself, you will always be searching and lost.

I don't want to do business with those who don't make a profit, because they can't give the best service.

Civilization... wrecks the planet from seafloor to stratosphere.

Here is the test to find whether your mission on Earth is finished: if you're alive, it isn't.

Ask yourself the secret of your success. Listen to your answer, and practice it.

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.

To bring anything into your life, imagine that it's already there.

I want to be very close to someone I respect and admire and have somebody who feels the same way about me.

Jonathan is that brilliant little fire that burns within us all, that lives only for those moments when we reach perfection.

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

Not being known doesn't stop the truth from being true.

I gave my life to become the person I am right now. Was it worth it?

Here is a test to find whether your mission on Earth is finished: If you're alive, it isn't.

Happiness is the reward we get for living to the highest right we know.

A professional writer is an amateur who didn't quit.

To fly as fast as thought, you must begin by knowing that you have already arrived.

Passionately obsessed by anything we love--an avalanche of magic flattens the way ahead, levels, rules, reasons, dissents, bears us with it over chasms, fears, doubts. Without the power of that love...."

Just read The Virtue of Minding Your Own Business. Oh my, what currents run deep! Beautifully seen, beautifully told. Praise praise praise . . . Pardon my French, but you are one darn major American writer!"---Richard Bach, author of Jonathan Livingston Seagull and Illusions, on Sandcastle and Other Stories"

We're the bridge across forever, arching above the sea, adventuring for our pleasure, living mysteries for the fun of it, choosing disasters triumphs challenges impossible odds, testing ourselves over and again, learning love and love and love!

It's like, at the end, there's this surprise quiz: Am I proud of me? I gave my life to become the person I am right now. Was it worth what I paid?

The simplest questions are the most profound. Where were you born? Where is your home? Where are you going? What are you doing? Think about these once in a while and watch your answers change.

I relax my body completely, relax my mind completely, and then imagine myself at a level where anything can happen.

Live never to be ashamed if anything you say or do is published around the world, even if what is said is not true.

All of us are called by something in this world that attracts us. And it doesn't matter what it is - you can be an engine mechanic or an aviator or you can be someone who loves their flower garden or the world of commerce or sailboats.

There are no mistakes. The events we bring upon ourselves, no matter how unpleasant, are necessary in order to learn what we need to learn; whatever steps we take, they're necessary to reach the places we've chosen to go.

Our soulmate is someone who shares our deepest longings, our sense of direction. When we're two balloons, and together our direction is up, chances are we've found the right person. Our soulmate is the one who makes life come to life.

Your only obligation in any lifetime is to be true to yourself.

Just be who you are, calm and clear and bright. Automatically, as we shine who we are, asking ourselves every minute is this what I really want to do, doing it only when we answer yes, automatically that turns away those who have nothing to learn from who we are and attracts those who do, and from whom we have to learn, as well.

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.

Jonathan sighed. The price of being misunderstood, he thought. They call you devil or they call you god.

If you will practice being fictional for a while, you will understand that fictional characters are sometimes more real than people with bodies and heartbeats.

Boredom between two people doesn't come from being together physically. It comes from being apart mentally and spiritually.

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.

A cloud does not know why it moves in just such a direction and at such a speed...It feels an impulsion...this is the place to go now. But the sky knows the reasons and the patterns behind all clouds, and you will know, too, when you lift yourself high enough to see beyond horizons.

If you love someone, set them free. If they come back they're yours; if they don't they never were.

Allow the world to live as it chooses, and allow yourself to live as you choose.

Life does not require us to be consistent, cruel, patient, helpful, angry, rational, thoughtless, loving, rash, open-minded, neurotic, careful, rigid, tolerant, wasteful, rich, downtrodden, gentle, sick, considerate, funny, stupid, healthy, greedy, beautiful, lazy, responsive, foolish, sharing, pressured, intimate, hedonistic, industrious, manipulative, insightful, capricious, wise, selfish, kind or sacrificed. Life does, however, require us to live with the consequences of our choices.

The mark of your ignorance is the depth of your belief in injustice and tragedy. What the caterpillar calls the end of the world, the Master calls the butterfly.

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.

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.

I trust that the current knows where it is going. I shall let go, and let it take me where it will. Clinging, I shall die of boredom.

Compelling reason will never convince blinding emotion.

Sooner I'd try to change history than turn political, than try convincing others to write letters or to vote or to march or to do something they didn't already feel like doing.

What was the question? ...Oh. Where do I get my crazy ideas? Answer: sleep-fairy, walk-fairy, shower-fairy. Book-fairy. And in these last few years, from my wife. Now when I have questions I ask her and she tells me the answer. If you haven't already, I'd suggest you want to find your soulmate, as soon as you can. Next question?

Every gift from a friend is a wish for your happiness.

In the highest sense, we are all creatures of light. And I have a very difficult time talking with people who are cynical about the world. "The world is no damn good, and we're all animals," and that kind of thing. Well, I'm an animal.

The worst lies are the lies we tell ourselves. We live in denial of what we do, even what we think. We do this because we're afraid.We fear we will not find love,and when we find it we fear we'll lose it. We fear that if we don't have love we will be unhappy.

Don't believe what your eyes are telling you. All they show is limitation. Look with your understanding, find out what you already know, and you'll see the way to fly.

Fear not, nor be dismayed at the appearance that is darkness, at the disguise that is evil, at the empty cloak that is death, for you have picked these for your challenges. They are stones on which you choose to whet the keen edge of your spirit.

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

Learning is finding out what you already know. Doing is demonstrating that you know it. Teaching is reminding others that they know just as well as you. You are all learners, doers, teachers.

The more I want to get something done, the less I call it work.

An easy life doesn't teach us anything. In the end it's the learning that matters: what we've learned and how we've grown

You teach best what you most need to learn.

I think the source of our sorrow and the source of our joy are intimately entwined. Our sorrow is that we have forgotten who we are, we have forgotten we are one with that source of all life - absolutely indestructible, perfect, joyful. The source of our joy is when we remember that.

A writer, or a beginning writer, is faced by the huge walls of self-consciousness. Most people think, "What if I say the wrong thing? What if I don't sound erudite and sophisticated? I'll be considered a fool." In time, with a lot of practice, you realize that's your foolishness is your gift.

Argue for your limitations, and sure enough they're yours.

Live enough of what you've always dreamed of doing, and there's no room left for feeling bad.

If your happiness depends on what somebody else does, I guess you do have a problem.

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

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.

We [Americans] are game-playing, fun-loving creatures; we are the otters of the universe.

We are each given a block of marble when we begin a lifetime, and the tools to shape it into sculpture... We can drag it behind us untouched, we can pound it into gravel, we can shape it into glory.

Jonathan Livingston Seagull . . . was no ordinary bird. 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.

The gull sees farthest who flies highest

For most gulls it was not flying that matters, but eating. For this gull, though, it was not eating that mattered, but flight.

Most gulls don't bother to learn more than the simplest facts of flight - how to get from shore to food and back again

The gulls who scorn perfection for the sake of travel go nowhere, slowly. Those who put aside travel for the sake of perfection go anywhere, instantly.

Jonathan Seagull discovered that boredom and fear and anger are the reasons that a gull's life is so short, and with those gone from his thought, he lived a long fine life indeed.

You don't love hatred and evil, of course. You have to practice and see the real gull, the good in every one of them, and to help them see it in themselves. That's what I mean by love.

It took time to learn that the hard thing about writing is to let the story write itself, while one sits at the typewriter and does as little thinking as possible. It happened over and over again, and the beginner learned - when you start puzzling over an idea, and slowing down on the keys, the writing gets worse and worse.

We all know those who draw their boundaries carefully and say, "I'm only human. Nobody's perfect. I accept my limitations." And we know others who take an opposite view and say, "I can do anything I choose to do. It is in my power to change the world." And those are the ones who most often change the world.

Like most writers, I like to find what I know and pass it along to anyone who cares. When that's done, as soon as I've said the best I can say, there's nothing else about me that's remotely interesting to anybody else, I go back behind the walls. I can be intimate in books, I can be intimate in talks, but then I need time to be alone.

I do not exist to impress the world. I exist to live my life in a way that will make me happy.

Win by losing. Before your outer walls break, as break they must, build an inner place to protect your truth. Protect that you are infinite life, choosing its playground; protect that the world you know exists with your consent and for your own good reasons; protect that your purpose and mission is to shine love in your own playful way, in the moments you decide will be most dramatic.

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

Two words: Love leads. Listen to that ring of love within. If we follow that leading of love we'll be guaranteed an adventurous, positive, joyful life.

Mistakes - call them unexpected learning experiences.

Cherish yesterday, Dream tomorrow, Live today.

In order to live free and happily you must sacrifice boredom. It is not always an easy sacrifice.

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.

The simplest things are often the truest.

Do you have any idea how many lives we must have gone through before we even got the first idea that there is more to life than eating, or fighting, or power in the Flock? A thousand lives, Jon, ten thousand!

Nothing happens by chance, my friend... No such thing as luck. A meaning behind every little thing, and such a meaning behind this. Part for you, part for me, may not see it all real clear right now, but we will, before long.

Nothing happens by chance, my friend... No such thing as luck.

Every problem has a gift for you in its hands.

The original sin is to limit the Is. Don't.

Then be sure of one thing: The Is has imagined it quite a bit better than you have. The original sin is to limit the Is. Don't.

Children are not our property, and they are not ours to control any more that we were our parents' property or theirs to control.

We design our lives through the power of choices.

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.

Books arent written on whim or promises. Books are written on years turned inside out by ideas that never let go until you get them in print, and even then writings a last resort, a desperate ransom you pay to get your life back.

Know that ever about you stands the reality of love, and each moment you have the power to transform your world by what you have learned.

Every word that judges value is circular. 'Good' is 'right' is 'proper' is 'just' is 'good'. But check the examples, and they're not circular at all: Every one says 'makes me happy

There are no mistakes. The events we bring upon ourselves, no matter how unpleasant, are necessary in order to learn what we need to learn; whatever steps we take, they're necessary to reach the places we've chosen to go

There's no disaster that can't become a blessing, and no blessing that can't become a disaster

The worst lies are the lies we tell ourselves. We live in denial of what we do, even what we think. We do this because we're afraid. We fear we will not find love, and when we find it we fear we'll lose it. We fear that if we do not have love we will be unhappy

To bring anything into your life, imagine that it's already there

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

Anything we need to know, we can learn it from a book. Reading, careful study, a little practice, and we're throwing knives expertly, overhauling engines, speaking Esperanto like natives.

Part of us is always the observer, and no matter what, it observes. It watches us. It does not care if we are happy or unhappy, if we are sick or well, if we live or die. It's only job is to sit there on our shoulder and pass judgment on whether we are worthwhile human beings.

We are game-playing, fun-having creatures, we are the otters of the universe.

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

No one does anything uncharacteristic of who they are.

Your conscience is the measure of the honesty of your selfishness.Listen to it carefully.

The more I want to get something done the less I call it work.