quotes by Richard Bach

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

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

"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."
— Richard Bach

"Argue for your limitations and, sure enough, they're yours."
— Richard Bach

"You're never given a dream without also being given the power to make it true."
— Richard Bach

"The bond that links your true family is not one of blood, but of respect and joy in each other's life. Rarely do members of one family grow up under the same roof."
— Richard Bach

"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 will see the way to fly."
— Richard Bach (Jonathan Livingston Seagull)

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

"What the caterpillar calls the end of the world, the master calls a butterfly."
— Richard Bach

"In order to live free and happily, you must sacrifice boredom. It is not always an easy choice."
— Richard Bach

"Here is a test to find whether your mission on Earth is finished: If you´re alive it isn´t.~~~~ "
— Richard Bach

"I do not exist to impress the world. I exist to live my life in a way that will make me happy. "
— Richard Bach (Illusions)

"That’s what learning is, after all; not whether we lose the game, but how we lose and how we’ve changed because of it, and what we take away from it that we never had before, to apply to other games. Losing, in a curious way is winning."
— Richard Bach (The Bridge Across Forever: A True Love Story)

"Your only obligation in any lifetime is to be true to yourself."
— Richard Bach (Illusions: The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah)

"Bad things are not the worst things that an happen to us. NOTHING is the worst thing that can happen to us."
— Richard Bach (One)

"When you have come to the edge of all the light you have
And step into the darkness of the unknown
Believe that one of the two will happen to you
Either you'll find something solid to stand on
Or you'll be taught how to fly!"
— Richard Bach

"I’m here not because I am supposed to be here, or because I’m trapped here, but because I’d rather be with you than anywhere else in the world."
— Richard Bach (The Bridge Across Forever: A True Love Story)

"If our friendship depends on things like space and time, then when we finally overcome space and time, we've destroyed our own brotherhood! But overcome space, and all we have left is Here. Overcome time, and all we have left is Now. And in the middle of Here and Now, don't you think that we might see each other once or twice?"
— Richard Bach (Jonathan Livingston Seagull)

"There is no such thing as a problem without a gift for you in its hands. You seek problems because you need their gifts."
— Richard Bach

"...That’s why love stories don’t have endings! They don’t have endings because love doesn’t end."
— Richard Bach (The Bridge Across Forever: A True Love Story)

" 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."
— Richard Bach (Illusions)

"Wrong turns are as important as right turns. More important, sometimes."
— Richard Bach (One)

"Remember where you came from, where you're going, and why you created this mess you got yourself into in the first place."
— Richard Bach (Illusions: The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah)

"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."
— Richard Bach

"There’s no disaster that can’t become a blessing, and no blessing that can’t become a disaster."
— Richard Bach (One)

"Learning is finding out what you already know. Doing is demonstrating that you know it. Teach is reminding others that they know just as well as you. You are all learners, doers, teachers. "
— Richard Bach (Illusions: The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah)

"Your conscience is the measure of the honesty of your selfishness.
Listen to it carefully."
— Richard Bach (Illusions)

"Next to ‘God’, ‘love’ is the word most mangled in every language."
— Richard Bach (The Bridge Across Forever: A True Love Story)

"Look in the mirror and one thing is sure: what we see is not who we are."
— Richard Bach (The Bridge Across Forever: A True Love Story)

"Of course there’s destiny, but destiny doesn’t push you where you don’t want to go. You’re the ones who choose. Destiny is up to you."
— Richard Bach (One)

"One way to pick a future is to believe it’s inevitable."
— Richard Bach (One)

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

"
— Richard Bach

"You are never given a wish without also being given the power to make it come true."
— Richard Bach (The Bridge Across Forever: A True Love Story)

"Boredom between two people doesn't come from being together physically. It comes from being apart mentally and spiritually."
— Richard Bach (The Bridge Across Forever: A True Love Story)

"I had grown up in a house with a fence around it, and in this fence was a white smooth wooden gate, two holes bored round and low together so the dog could see through. One night, the moon high, late for me home from the school dance, I remember that I stopped, hand on the gate, and spoke so quietly to myself and to the woman that I would love that not even the dog could have heard.

‘I don’t know where you are, but you’re living right now, somewhere on this earth. And one day you and I are going to touch this gate where I’m touching it now. Your hand will touch this very wood, here! Then we’ll walk through and we’ll be full of a future and of a past and we’ll be to each other like no one else has ever been. We can’t meet now, I don’t know why. But some day our questions will be answers and we’ll be caught in something so bright...and every step I take is one step closer on a bridge we must cross to meet.'"
— Richard Bach (The Bridge Across Forever: A True Love Story)

"We teach best what we most need to learn."
— Richard Bach (Illusions)

"You will begin to touch heaven, Jonathan, in the moment that you touch perfect speed. And that isn’t flying a thousand miles an hour, or a million, or flying at the speed of light. Because any number is a limit, and perfection doesn’t have limits. Perfect speed, my son, is being there."
— Richard Bach (Jonathan Livingston Seagull)

"The only thing that shatters dreams is compromise."
— Richard Bach (The Bridge Across Forever: A True Love Story)

"Character comes from following our highest sense of right, from trusting ideas without being sure they’ll work."
— Richard Bach (One)

"A professional writer is an amateur who didn't quit."
— Richard Bach

"It must happen to us all…We pack up what we’ve learned so far and leave the familiar behind. No fun, that shearing separation, but somewhere within, we must dimly know that saying goodbye to safety brings the only security we’ll ever know."
— Richard Bach (Running from Safety: An Adventure of the Spirit)

"The world is your exercise book, the pages on which you do your sums. It is not reality, though you may express reality there if you wish. You are also free to write lies, or nonsense, or to tear the pages."
— Richard Bach

"How much to learn if we could spend one hour, spend twenty minutes, with the us we will become! How much could we say to the us we were."
— Richard Bach (The Bridge Across Forever: A True Love Story)

"Has it ever happened, you’ve seen a striking film, beautifully written and acted and photographed, that you walk out of the theater glad to be a human being and you say to yourself I hope they make a lot of money from that? I hope the actors, I hope the director earns a million dollars for what they’ve done, what they’ve given me tonight? And you go back and see the movie again and you’re happy to be a tiny part of the system that is rewarding those people with every ticket...the actors I see on the screen, they’ll get twenty cents of this very dollar I’m paying now; they’ll be able to buy an ice cream cone any flavor they want from their share of my ticket alone. Glorious moments in art in books and films and dance, they’re delicious because we see ourselves in glory’s mirror."
— Richard Bach (The Bridge Across Forever: A True Love Story)

"It’s not when you start that makes your success in the world, but when you quit."
— Richard Bach (Nothing by Chance)

"A tiny change today brings a dramatically different tomorrow."
— Richard Bach (One)

"Any powerful idea is absolutely fascinating and absolutely useless until we choose to use it."
— Richard Bach (One)

"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."
— Richard Bach (One)

"...nobody means to get carried away in mediocrity, but it happens, it happens unless you think about everything you do, unless you make every choice the best one you know how to make."
— Richard Bach (One)

"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."
— Richard Bach (Running from Safety: An Adventure of the Spirit)