— 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

My soul is in the sky.

— William Shakespeare, 'A Midsummer Night's Dream,' Act V. Scene I.

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

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

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.

By day, or on a cloudless night, a pilot may drink the wine of the gods, but it has an earthly taste; he's a god of the earth, like one of the Grecian deities who lives on worldly mountains and descended for intercourse with men. But at night, over a stratus layer, all sense of the planet may disappear. You know that down below, beneath that heavenly blanket is the earth, factual and hard. But it's an intellectual knowledge; it's a knowledge tucked away in the mind; not a feeling that penetrates the body. And if at times you renounce experience and mind's heavy logic, it seems that the world has rushed along on its orbit, leaving you alone flying above a forgotten cloud bank, somewhere in the solitude of interstellar space.

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

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

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

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!

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

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.

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

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

The magic of the craft has opened for me a world in which I shall confront, within two hours, the black dragons and the crowned crests of a coma of blue lightnings, and when night has fallen I, delivered, shall read my course in the starts.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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!

Dad, I left my heart up there.

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

I've had a ball.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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...

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

It was a thunderingly beautiful experience -- voluptuous, sexual, dangerous, and expensive as hell.

— Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. 'Playboy Interview, 1973,' regards the Apollo launches.

As you pass from sunlight into darkness and back again every hour and a half, you become startingly aware how artificial are thousands of boundaries we've created to separate and define. And for the first time in your life you feel in your gut the precious unity of the Earth and all the living things it supports.

Our passionate preoccupation with the sky, the stars, and a God somewhere in outer space is a homing impulse. We are drawn back to where we came from.

— Eric Hoffer, 'New York Times,' 21 July 1969, regards the first moon-landing.

Prometheus is reaching out for the stars with an empty grin on his face.

— Arthur Koestler, regarding the first moon-landing, The New York Times, 21 July 1969.

Treading the soil of the moon, palpating its pebbles, tasting the panic and splendor of the event, feeling in the pit of one's stomach the separation from terra . . . these form the most romantic sensation an explorer has ever known . . . this is the only thing I can say about the matter. The utilitarian results do not interest me.

— Vladimir Nabokov, referring to the first moon-landing, quoted in The New York Times, 21 July 1969.

But the astronauts who lost their lives on Challenger, as well as the other eight astronauts who were killed in the line of duty and the four Soviet cosmonauts who died in space serve as inspiration for us all. None of them would have wanted to give her or his life in vain. None would have wanted us to stop striving for the stars. If anything, we must continue to preserve their dreams.

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

I'll run my hand gently over the wing of a small airplane and say to him, "This plane can teach you more things and give you more gifts than I ever could. It won't get you a better job, a faster car, or a bigger house. But if you treat it with respect and keep your eyes open, it may remind you of some things you used to know -- that life is in the moment, joy matters more than money, the world is a beautiful place, and that dreams really, truly are possible." And then, because airplanes speak in a language beyond words, I'll take him up in the evening summer sky and let the airplane show him what I mean.

— Lane Wallace, 'Eyes of a Child,' Flying magazine, February 2000.

Father, we thank you, especially for letting me fly this flight … for the privilege of being able to be in this position, to be in this wondrous place, seeing all these many startling, wonderful things that you have created.

There is no flying without wings.

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!

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.

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

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

They shall mount up on wings as eagles.

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

I may be flying a complicated airplane, rushing through space, but in this cabin I'm surrounded by simplicity and thoughts set free of time. How detached the intimate things around me seem from the great world down below. How strange is this combination of proximity and separation. That ground -- seconds away -- thousands of miles away. This air, stirring mildly around me. That air, rushing by with the speed of a tornado, an inch beyond. These minute details in my cockpit. The grandeur of the world outside. The nearness of death. The longness of life.

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

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.

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 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.

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.

More varied than any landscape was the landscape in the sky, with islands of gold and silver, peninsulas of apricot and rose against a background of many shades of turquoise and azure.

Ah hell. We had more fun in a week than those weenies had in a lifetime.

— Pancho Barnes, quoted in 'The Happy Bottom Riding Club - The Life and Times of Pancho Barnes,' by Lauren Kesler.

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

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

— Percy Knauth, 'Wind on my wings,' 1960.

Are we lost, or are we found at last?
On earth we strive for our various needs, because so goes the fundamental law of man. Aloft, at least for a little while, the needs disappear. Likewise the striving.
In the thoughts of man aloft, food and evil become mixed and sometimes reversed. This is the open door to wisdom.
Aloft, the earth is ancient and man is young, regardless of his numbers, for there, aloft he may reaffirm his suspicions that he may not be so very much. This is the gateway to humility.
And yet, aloft there are moments when man can ask himself, "what am I, this creature so important to me? Who is it rules me from birth to tomb? Am I but a slave destined to crawl for labor to hearth and back again? Am I but one of the living dead, or my own god set free?" This is the invitation to full life. . . .
"Where are we?"
"If you really must know, I'll tell you."
"Never mind. Here aloft, we are not lost, but found."

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.

The bluebird carries the sky on his back.

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

The philosopher is Nature's pilot. And there you have our difference: to be in hell is to drift: to be in heaven is to steer.

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

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

Caution: Cape does not enable user to fly.

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

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

The cockpit was my office. It was a place where I experienced many emotions and learned many lessons. It was a place of work, but also a keeper of dreams. It was a place of deadly serious encounters, yet there I discovered much about life. I learned about joy and sorrow, pride and humility, fear and overcoming fear. I saw much from that office that most people would never see. At times it terrified me, yet I could always feel at home there. It was my place, at that time in space, and the jet was mine for those moments. Though it was a place where I could quickly die, the cockpit was a place where I truly lived.

Whether we call it sacrifice, or poetry, or adventure, it is always the same voice that calls.

Man's mind and spirit grow with the space in which they are allowed to operate.

Again I felt that overpowering rush of excitement which I fond almost everyone has experienced who has seen a man fly. It is an exhilaration, a thrill, an ecstasy. Just as children jump and clap their hands to see a kite mount, so, when the machine leaves the ground and with a soaring movement really flies upon its speeding wings, one feels impelled to shout, to rush after it, to do anything which will relieve the overcharged emotion.

Flying is a lot like playing a musical instrument; you're doing so many things and thinking of so many other things, all at the same time. It becomes a spiritual experience. Something wonderful happens in the pit of your stomach.

Before take-off, a professional pilot is keen, anxious, but lest someone read his true feelings he is elaborately casual. The reason for this is that he is about to enter a new though familiar world. The process of entrance begins a short time before he leaves the ground and is completed the instant he is in the air. From that moment on, not only his body but his spirit and personality exist in a separate world known only to himself and his comrades.

As the years go by, he returns to this invisible world rather than to earth for peace and solace. There also he finds a profound enchantment, although he can seldom describe it. He can discuss it with others of his kind, and because they too know and feel its power they understand. But his attempts to communicate his feelings to his wife or other earthly confidants invariable end in failure.

Flying is hypnotic and all pilots are willing victims to the spell. Their world is like a magic island in which the factors of life and death assume their proper values. Thinking becomes clear because there are no earthly foibles or embellishments to confuse it. Professional pilots are, of necessity, uncomplicated, simple men. Their thinking must remain straightforward, or they die -- violently.

The men in this book are fictitious characters but their counterparts can be found in cockpits all over the world. Now they are flying a war. Tomorrow they will be flying a peace, for, regardless of the world's condition, flying is their life.

All my life, I've never been able to get enough airplanes. This will keep me flying every day.

For pilots sometimes see behind the curtain, behind the veil of gossamer velvet, and find the truth behind man, the force behind a universe.

My father had been opposed to my flying from the first and had never flown himself. However, he had agreed to go up with me at the first opportunity, and one afternoon he climbed into the cockpit and we flew over the Redwood Falls together. From that day on I never heard a word against my flying and he never missed a chance to ride in the plane.

— Charles Lindbergh, 'We,' 1928.

When I was twenty, most of my friends were dead. We had sweated out the troopship journey together, shared the excitements of new countries, endured and enjoyed the efforts of learning to fly. At last we had completed our training, and had stood in the hot Rhodesian sun together while our wings were pinned on our chests. We were then more than friends; we were fellow pilots, which to a boy of nineteen was inexpressibly wonderful...

The job has its grandeurs, yes. There is the exultation of arriving safely after a storm, the joy of gliding down out of the darkness of night or tempest toward a sun-drenched Alicante or Santiago; there is the swelling sense of returning to repossess one's place in life, in the miraculous garden of earth, where are trees and women and, down by the harbor, friendly little bars. When he has throttles his engine and is banking into the airport, leaving the somber cloud masses behind, what pilot does not break into song?

Here above the farms and ranches of the Great Plains aviation lives up to the promise that inspired dreamers through the ages. Here you are truly separate from the earth, at least for a little while, removed from the cares and concerns that occupy you on the ground. This separation from the earth is more than symbolic, more than a physical removal-it has an emotional dimension as tangible as the wood, fabric, and steel that has transported you aloft.

Those rotary engines. . . the Le Rhones, the Monos, and the Clergets! They made a sort of crackling hiss, and always the same smell of castor oil spraying backwards dThe 0 in a fine mist over your leather helmet and your coat. They were delightful to fly, the controls so light, the engines so smooth running. Up among the sunlit cumulus under the blue sky I could loop and rolls and spin my Camel with the pressure of two fingers on the stick besides the button which I used as little as possible. Looping, turn off the petrol by the big plug cock upon the panel just before the bottom of the dive, ease the stick gently back and over you go. The engine dies at the top of the loop; ease the stick fully back and turn the petrol on again so that the engine comes to life five or six seconds later.

She would climb at nearly a thousand feet a minute, my new Clerget Camel; she would do a hundred and ten miles an hour. She would be faster, I thought, than anything upon the Western Front... A turn to the left in the bright sun, keeping the hedge in sight through the hole in the top plane. A turn to the right. Now, turn in, a little high, stick over and top rudder, the air squirting in upon you sideways round the windscreen. Straight out, over the hedge, and down onto the grass. Remember that the Clerget lands very fast, at over forty miles an hour, and with that great engine in the nose the tail was light. Watch it... Lovely.

Racing planes didn't necessarily require courage, but it did demand a certain amount of foolhardiness and a total disregard of one's skin. ... I would be flying now, but there's precious little demand for an elderly lady air racer.

"Just try and remember," I said slowly," that if God had intended men to fly He'd have given us wings. So all flying is flying in the face of nature. It's unnatural, wicked and stuffed with risks all the time. The secret to flying is learning to minimize the risks."
"Or perhaps -- the secret of life is to choose your risks?"

I owned the world that hour as I rode over it…. free of the earth, free of the mountains, free of the clouds, but how inseparably I was bound to them.

— Charles A. Lindbergh, on flying above the Rocky Mountains, quoted by Leonard Mosley in 'Lindbergh' 1978.

If the heavens be penatrable, and no lets, it were not amiss to make wings and fly up, and some new-fangled wits should some time or other find out.

Aviation is proof, that given the will, we have the capacity to achieve the impossible.

Earthbound souls know only the underside of the atmosphere in which they live . . . but go higher - above the dust and water vapor - and the sky turns dark until one can see the stars at noon.

We thought humble and proud at the same time, all at once in love again with this painful bittersweet lovely thing called flight.

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

Fighter pilot is an attitude. It is cockiness. It is aggressiveness. It is self-confidence. It is a streak of rebelliousness, and it is competitiveness. But there's something else - there's a spark. There's a desire to be good. To do well; In the eyes of your peers, and in your own mind.

I think it is love of that blue vault of sky that becomes your playground if, and only if, you are a fighter pilot. You don't understand it if you fly from A to B in straight and level, and merely climb and descend. You're moving through the basement of that bolt of blue.

A fighter pilot is a man in love with flying. A fighter pilot sees not a cloud but beauty. Not the ground but something remote from him, something that he doesn't belong to as long as he is airborne. He's a man who wants to be second-best to no one.

Why fly? Simple. I'm not happy unless there's some room between me and the ground.

In the case of pilots, it is a little touch of madness that drive us to go beyond all known bounds. Any search into the unknown is an incomparable exploitation of oneself.

But what I could never tell of was the beauty and exaltation of flying itself. Above the haze layer with the sun behind you or sinking ahead, alone in an open cockpit, there is nothing and everything to see. The upper surface of the haze stretches on like an endless desert, featureless and flat, and empty to the horizon. It seems your world alone. Threading one's way through the great piles of summer cumulus that hang over the plains, the patches of ground that show far far below are for earthbound folk, and the cloud shapes are sculptured just for you. The flash of rain, the shining rainbow riding completely around the plane, the lift over mountain ridges, the steady, pure air at dawn take-offs. . . . It was so alive and rich a life that any other conceivable choice seemed dull, prosaic, and humdrum.

Though, as he was torn into a pink upper air, she was a good craft to ride in, for her belly was firm and her breasts enabled a flying man good hold and emotions of heady safety. . . . Steering her peasant tits he bounded off stars.

Flying is like sex - I've never had all I wanted but occasionally I've had all I could stand.

Buddy of mine once told me that he'd rather fly a jet than kiss his girl. Said it gave him more of a kick.

Flight is romance - not in the sense of sexual attraction, but as an experience that enriches life.

I have often said that the lure of flying is the lure of beauty. That the reasons flyers fly, whether they know it or not, is the aesthetic appeal of flying.

One cannot look at the sea without wishing for the wings of a swallow.

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.

In our dreams we are able to fly . . . and that is a remembering of how we were meant to be.

In order to invent the airplane you must have at least a thousand years' experience dreaming of angels.

Deftly they opened the brain of a child, and it was full of flying dreams.

You are brave. Not brave because you are going to be facing any physical dangers; you are not really going to. I mean brave in another, deeper sense. By being on this flight you have shown that you are willing to explore your own identity to discover what might lie within you. Your human clay has not hardened, and you are also willing to explore your own perceptions of the universe, knowing that you may be forced to set aside many comfortable and cherished assumptions. The idea that you must approach honestly and directly is that flying very dramatically makes the pilot solely responsible for his own life.

— Harry Bauer, 'The Flying Mystique: Exploring Reality and Self in the Sky,' 1980.

I had that morning gone to say my farewells to Broadhurst and to the RAF. I had made a point of going to HQ at Schleswig in my 'Grand Charles'. Coming back I had taken him high up in the cloudless summer sky, for it was only there that I could fittingly take my leave.
Together we climbed for the last time straight towards the sun. We looped once, perhaps twice, we lovingly did a few slow, meticulous rolls, so that I could take away in my finger-tips the vibration of his supple, docile wings.

And in that narrow cockpit I wept, as I shall never weep again, when I felt the concrete brush against his wheels and, with a great sweep of the wrist, dropped him on the ground like a cut flower.
As always, I carefully cleared the engine, turned off all the switches one by one, removed the straps, the wires and the tubes which tied me to him, like a child to his mother. And when my waiting pilots and my mechanics saw my downcast eyes and my shaking shoulders, they understood and returned to the dispersal in silence.

— Pierre Clostermann, 'The big show,' 1951.

And should I not, had I but known, have flung the machine this way and that, once more to feel it live under my hand, have sported in the sky and laughed and sung, knowing that never after should I feel so free, so sure in hazard, so secure, riding the daylight in the pride of youth? No more horizons wider than Hope! No more the franchise of the sky, the freedom of the blue! No more! Farewell to wings! Down to the little earth!

That distant day had a significance I could not give it then. So we wheeled and came back south towards the city. The Temple of Heaven slipped by underneath, that perfect pattern in its ample park. Then the wide plain ruled to the far horizon. Soon the aerodrome.

Now shut the engines off. Come down and flatten out, feel the long float, and at the given moment pull the stick right home. She's down. Now taxi in. Switch off. It's over - but not quite, for the port engine, just as if it knew, as if reluctant at the last to let me go, kicked, kicked, and kicked again, as overheated engines will, then backfired with an angry snorting: Fool! The best is over ...But I did not hear.

— Cecil Lewis, 'Sagittarius Rising,' 1936, regards flying for the last time a Vickers Vimy over Peking, 1921

Before I went to the Mess I made the excuse I wanted to get something out of my aeroplane, and climbed into the cockpit; I did this, however, to be able to say good-bye to the old dear; and I really felt dreadfully sorry to part with her. I get very attached to aeroplanes, and I am one of those people who think that they aren't so inanimate as we are told they are.

— Charles Rumney Samson, 'A Flight from Cairo to Cape Town and back,' 1931.

Fly, dotard, fly!
With thy wise dreams and fables of the sky.

Lend, lend your wings! I mount! I fly!
O grave! where is thy victory?
O death! where is thy sting?

Flying is an act of conquest, of defeating the most basic and powerful forces of nature. It unites the violent rage and brute power of jet engines with the infinitesimal tolerances of the cockpit. Airlines take their measurements from the ton to the milligram, from the mile to the millimeter, endowing any careless move - an engine setting, a flap position, a training failure - with the power to wipe out hundreds of lives.

So long as the airlines preserve their magic quality -- including, above all, their safety and reliability -- they will be guaranteed a significant role in the workings of the world. Science will never digitalize an embrace. Electronics will never convey the wavering eye of a negotiating adversary. Fiber-optic cable can do many things, but it cannot transport hot sand, fast snow, or great ruins.

The great bird will take its first flight . . . filling the world with amazement and all records with its fame, and it will bring eternal glory to the nest where it was born.

A sky as pure as water bathed the stars and brought them out.

I will fly in the greatness of God as the marsh-hen flies,
In the freedom that fills all the space 'twixt the marsh and the skies.

It is not enough to just ride this earth. You have to aim higher, try to take off, even fly. It is our duty.

The higher we soar, the smaller we appear to those who cannot fly.

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

What freedom lies in flying, what Godlike power it gives to men . . . I lose all consciousness in this strong unmortal space crowded with beauty, pierced with danger.

Flying might not be all plain sailing, but the fun of it is worth the price.

Take possession of the air, submit the elements, penetrate the last redoubts of nature, make space retreat, make death retreat.

A man can criticize a pilot for flying into a mountainside in fog, but I would rather by far die on a mountainside than in bed. What sort of man would live where there is no daring? Is life itself so dear that we should blame one for dying in adventure? Is there a better way to die?

How many more years I shall be able to work on the problem I do not know; I hope, as long as I live. There can be no thought of finishing, for 'aiming at the stars' both literally and figuratively, is a problem to occupy generations, so that no matter how much progress one makes, there is always the thrill of just beginning.

Live thy life as it were spoil and pluck the joys that fly.

The sea is dangerous and its storms terrible, but these obstacles have never been sufficient reason to remain ashore. . . . Unlike the mediocre, intrepid spirits seek victory over those things that seem impossible. . . . It is with an iron will that they embark on the most daring of all endeavors. . . . to meet the shadowy future without fear and conquer the unknown.

— Ferdinand Magellan, circa 1520.

And if flying, like a glass-bottomed bucket, can give you that vision, that seeing eye, which peers down on the still world below the choppy waves -- it will always remain magic.

— Anne Morrow Lindbergh, 'North to the Orient,' 1935.

The facts are that flying satisfies deeply rooted desires. For as long as time these desires have hungered vainly for fulfillment. The horse, and later the motorcar, have merely teased them. The upward sweep of the airplane signifies release.

— Bruce Gould, 'Sky Larking,' 1929.

Many wonderful inventions have surprised us during the course of the last century and the beginning of this one. But most were completely unexpected and were not part of the old baggage of dreams that humanity carries with it. Who had ever dreamed of steamships, railroads, or electric light? We welcomed all these improvements with astonished pleasure; but they did not correspond to an expectation of our spirit or a hope as old as we are: to overcome gravity, to tear ourselves away from the earth, to become lighter, to fly away, to take possession of the immense aerial kingdom; to enter the universe of the Gods, to become Gods ourselves.