Inspirational Aviation and Famous Pilot Quotes, Part 2

To kick off the New Year in positive style, we present you with a new compilation of inspirational quotes on aviation, aircraft and flying. Our first list back in June was highly popular so we hope you receive some inspiration from these as well. Apparently, pilots are poets at heart.

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.

The reason angels can fly is because they take themselves lightly.

— G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

The Wright Brothers created the single greatest cultural force since the invention of writing. The airplane became the first World Wide Web, bringing people, languages, ideas, and values together.

— Bill Gates

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 

Flight is the only truly new sensation than men have achieved in modern history.

—James Dickey

You haven’t seen a tree until you’ve seen its shadow from the sky.

— Amelia Earhart

If happy little bluebirds fly beyond the rainbow, why oh why can't I?

— E.Y. Harburg

I think it is a pity to lose the romantic side of flying and simply to accept it as a common means of transport.

— Amy Johnson

Sometimes, flying feels too God like to be attained by man. Sometimes, the world from above seems too beautiful, too wonderful, too distant for human eyes to see.

— Charles A. Lindbergh, The Spirit of St. Louis, 1953.

Whenever we safely land in a plane, we promise God a little something.

— Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic’s Notebook, 1960

He who would learn to fly one day must first learn to stand and walk and run and climb and dance; one cannot fly into flying.

— Friedrich Nietzsche

The desire to reach for the sky runs deep in our human psyche.

— Cesar Pelli

Never fly the A model of anything.

— World War II Pilot Officer Edward Thompson of 433 (RCAF) Squadron

The air up there in the clouds is very pure and fine, bracing and delicious. And why shouldn’t it be? It is the same the angels breathe.

— Mark Twain, Roughing It, 1872

A single lifetime, even though entirely devoted to the sky, would not be enough for the study of so vast a subject. A time will come when our descendants will be amazed that we did not know things that are so plain to them.

— Seneca, Roman philosopher, 1st century AD

My soul is in the sky.

— William Shakespeare, “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” Act V. Scene I.

Man must rise above the Earth—to the top of the atmosphere and beyond—for only thus will he fully understand the world in which he lives.

— Socrates

If God had really intended men to fly, he’d make it easier to get to the airport.

— George Winters

There is no sport equal to that which aviators enjoy while being carried through the air on great white wings.

— Wilbur Wright, 1905

No one can realize how substantial the air is, until he feels its supporting power beneath him. It inspires confidence at once.

— Otto Lilienthal, German inventor of the first successful glider, 1893.

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