Quotes about flight (419 quotes) | Quotes of famous people

“Caged birds accept each other, but flight is what they long for.”

Tennessee Williams (1911–1983) American playwright

Bird

“I am very shy. If I am flying British Airways and the airhostess asks me two questions, and I don't understand her accent - I will go hungry for the entire flight.”

Shahrukh Khan (1965) Indian actor, producer and television personality

From interview with Malavika Sangghvi

Understanding , Question , Flying

“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 (1452–1519) Italian Renaissance polymath

This quotation was first used in print (and misattributed to Leonardo da Vinci) in a science fiction story published in 1975, The Storms of Windhaven. One of the authors, Lisa Tuttle, remembers that the quote was suggested by science fiction writer Ben Bova, who says he believes he got the quote from a TV documentary narrated by Fredric March, presumably I, Leonardo da Vinci, written by John H. Secondari for the series Saga of Western Man, which aired on 23 February 1965. Bova incorrectly assumed that he was quoting da Vinci. The probable author is John Hermes Secondari (1919-1975), American author and television producer.
Misattributed
Variant: For once you have tasted flight you will walk the earth with your eyes turned skywards, for there you have been and there you will long to return.

“This is how it should be done: lodge yourself on a stratum, experiment with the opportunities it offers, find an advantageous place on it, find potential movements of deterritorialization, possible lines of flight, experience them, produce flow conjunctions here and there, try out continuums of intensities segment by segment, have a small plot of new land at all times.”

Gilles Deleuze (1925–1995) French philosopher

Time

“Some people are like Slinkies. They aren't really good for anything, but they still bring a smile to my face when I push them down a flight of stairs.”

Patricia Briggs book Iron Kissed

Source: Iron Kissed

People , Smile

“Now cracks a noble heart. Good-night, sweet prince;
And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest.”

William Shakespeare Hamlet

Source: Hamlet

Angels , Singing , Heart , Night

“What then is the place and role of the writer in this cruel, dynamic, split world on the brink of its ten destructions? After all we have nothing to do with letting off rockets, we do not even push the lowliest of hand-carts, we are quite scorned by those who respect only material power. Is it not natural for us too to step back, to lose faith in the steadfastness of goodness, in the indivisibility of truth, and to just impart to the world our bitter, detached observations: how mankind has become hopelessly corrupt, how men have degenerated, and how difficult it is for the few beautiful and refined souls to live amongst them?
But we have not even recourse to this flight. Anyone who has once taken up the WORD can never again evade it; a writer is not the detached judge of his compatriots and contemporaries, he is an accomplice to all the evil committed in his native land or by his countrymen.”

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918–2008) Russian writer

Nobel lecture (1970)

Men , Truth , World , Faith

“One night, returning home, much intoxicated, from one of my haunts about town, I fancied that the cat avoided my presence. I seized him; when, in his fright at my violence, he inflicted a slight wound upon my hand with his teeth. The fury of a demon instantly possessed me. I knew myself no longer. My original soul seemed, at once, to take its flight from my body; and a more than fiendish malevolence, gin-nurtured, thrilled every fiber of my frame. I took from my waistcoat-pocket a penknife, opened it, grasped the poor beast by the throat, and deliberately cut one of its eyes from the socket!”

Edgar Allan Poe book The Black Cat

The Black Cat (1843)

Home , Soul , Cats , Night

“I hate when I'm on a flight and I wake up with a water bottle next to me like oh great now I gotta be responsible for this water bottle”

Kanye West (1977) American rapper, singer and songwriter

Tweet http://twitter.com/#!/kanyewest/status/27590685489

Hate , Water

“The dream [of flying] is as old as Icarus... I too want to give back to man the feeling of flight [with his 'Letatlin'-air-bike, 1929-1932]. This we have been robbed of by the mechanical flight of the aeroplane. We cannot feel the movement of our body in the air.”

Vladimir Tatlin (1885–1953) Russian artist

quote, c. 1930; https://utopiadystopiawwi.wordpress.com/constructivism/vladimir-tatlin/letalin/ cited by Christina Lodder, in Russian Constructivism; Yale University Press, Connecticut, 1983, p. 213
The 'Letatlin' was a glider, what Tatlin called an 'air bike', since it would be manually pedaled by the user and contain no motor
Quotes, 1926 - 1954

Dreams , Feeling , Flying

“I am doubtful myself about the undertaking. Part of the attraction of the L. R. is, I think, due to the glimpses of a large history in the background: an attraction like that of viewing far off an unvisited island, or seeing the towers of a distant city gleaming in a sunlit mist. To go there is to destroy the magic, unless new unattainable vistas are again revealed. Also many of the older legends are purely 'mythological', and nearly all are grim and tragic: a long account of the disasters that destroyed the beauty of the Ancient World, from the darkening of Valinor to the Downfall of Númenor and the flight of Elendil.”

John Ronald Reuel Tolkien (1892–1973) British philologist and author, creator of classic fantasy works

No. 247: To Colonel Worskett (20 September 1963)
The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien (1981)

World , Beauty , History , Thinking

“Wasn't writing a kind of soaring, an achievable form of flight, of fancy, of the imagination?”

Ian McEwan book Atonement

Source: Atonement

Imagination

“We battled in secret, undeclared, and after a while I no longer fought back because I never won. The only defense was flight, invisibility.”

Margaret Atwood book Surfacing

Source: Surfacing

Secret

“Never regret thy fall,
O Icarus of the fearless flight
For the greatest tragedy of them all
Is never to feel the burning light.”

Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) Irish writer and poet

Feeling , Light

“Thus I die. Thus, thus, thus.
Now I am dead,
Now I am fled,
My soul is in the sky.
Tongue, lose thy light.
Moon take thy flight.
Now die, die, die, die.”

William Shakespeare A Midsummer Night's Dream

Source: A Midsummer Night's Dream

Soul , Light , Dead

“The human bird shall take his first flight, filling the words with amazement, all writings with his fame, and bringing eternal glory to those whose nest whence he sprang.”

Leonardo Da Vinci (1452–1519) Italian Renaissance polymath

Bird

“Space flights are merely an escape, a fleeing away from oneself, because it is easier to go to Mars or to the moon than it is to penetrate one's own being.”

C.G. Jung (1875–1961) Swiss psychiatrist and psychotherapist who founded analytical psychology

“We are about to change history, said Saphira.
We’re throwing ourselves off a cliff without knowing how deep the water below is.
Ah, but what a glorious flight!
(Eragon to Saphira)”

Christopher Paolini book Eldest

Source: Eldest

History , Water , Change

“Some might think that the creativity, imagination, and flights of fancy that give my life meaning are insanity.”

Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977) Russian-American novelist, lepidopterist, professor

Life , Imagination , Thinking

“While a few pertinent points have to be marked, the general impression I desire to convey is of a side door crashing open in life's full flight, and a rush of roaring black time drowning with its whipping wind the cry of lone disaster.”

Vladimir Nabokov book Lolita

Source: Lolita

Life , Time , Cry

“We labour at our daily work more ardently and thoughtlessly than is necessary to sustain our life because it is even more necessary not to have leisure to stop and think. Haste is universal because everyone is in flight from himself.”

Friedrich Nietzsche Untimely Meditations

Source: Untimely Meditations

Life , Thinking , Universe

“The genius continually discovers fate, and the more profound the genius, the more profound the discovery of fate. To spiritlessness, this is naturally foolishness, but in actuality it is greatness, because no man is born with the idea of providence, and those who think that one acquires it gradually though education are greatly mistaken, although I do not thereby deny the significance of education. Not until sin is reached is providence posited. Therefore the genius has an enormous struggle to reach providence. If he does not reach it, truly he becomes a subject for the study of fate. The genius is an omnipotent Ansich [in itself] which as such would rock the whole world. For the sake of order, another figure appears along with him, namely fate. Fate is nothing. It is the genius himself who discovers it, and the more profound the genius, the more profoundly he discovers fate, because that figure is merely the anticipation of providence. If he continues to be merely a genius and turns outward, he will accomplish astonishing things; nevertheless, he will always succumb to fate, if not outwardly, so that it is tangible and visible to all, then inwardly. Therefore, a genius-existence is always like a fairy tale if in the deepest sense the genius does not turn inward into himself. The genius is able to do all things, and yet he is dependent upon an insignificance that no one comprehends, an insignificance upon which the genius himself by his omnipotence bestows omnipotent significance. Therefore, a second lieutenant, if he is a genius, is able to become an emperor and change the world, so that there becomes one empire and one emperor. But therefore, too, the army may be drawn up for battle, the conditions for the battle absolutely favorable, and yet in the next moment wasted; a kingdom of heroes may plead that the order for battle be given-but he cannot; he must wait for the fourteenth of June. And why? Because that was the date of the battle of Marengo. So all things may be in readiness, he himself stands before the legions, waiting only for the sun to rise in order to announce the time for the oration that will electrify the soldiers, and the sun may rise more glorious than ever, an inspiring and inflaming sight for all, only not for him, because the sun did not rise as glorious as this at Austerlitz, and only the sun of Austerlitz gives victory and inspiration. Thus, the inexplicable passion with which such a one may often rage against an entirely insignificant man, when otherwise he may show humanity and kindness even toward his enemies. Yes, woe unto the man, woe unto the woman, woe unto the innocent child, woe unto the beast of the field, woe unto the bird whose flight, woe unto the tree whose branch comes in his way at the moment he is to interpret his omen.”

Napoleon I of France (1769–1821) French general, First Consul and later Emperor of the French

Søren Kierkegaard The Concept of Anxiety, Nichol p. 98-100 (1844)
About

Fate , World , Education , Way

“Hearing, one day, that a poor young girl of her acquaintance had been enticed to a fashionable house of ill-fame, she ran to the place, entered the house, and claimed the girl. She found there several gentlemen of the Court, whom she rebuked with a severity, the justice of which they confessed by sudden and precipitate flight; she then took the young girl by the hand and led her from the abode of shame.”

Josephine Butler (1828–1906) British feminist

1874 https://attackingthedevil.co.uk/related/thoughts.php

Justice , Girl , Fashion , Housing

“When the war started in Abyssinia all Negro nationalists looked with hope to Haile Selassie. They spoke for him, they prayed for him, they sung for him, they did everything to hold up his hands, as Aaron did for Moses; but whilst the Negro peoples of the world were praying for the success of Abyssinia this little Emperor was undermining the fabric of his own kingdom by playing the fool with white men, having them advising him[, ] having them telling him what to do, how to surrender, how to call off the successful thrusts of his [Race] against the Italian invaders. Yes, they were telling him how to prepare his flight, and like an imbecilic child he followed every advice and then ultimately ran away from his country to England, leaving his people to be massacred by the Italians, and leaving the serious white world to laugh at every Negro and repeat the charge and snare - "he is incompetent," "we told you so." Indeed Haile Selassie has proved the incompetence of the Negro for political authority, but thank God there are Negroes who realise that Haile Selassie did not represent the truest qualities of the Negro race. How could he, when he wanted to play white? How could he, when he surrounded himself with white influence? How could he, when in a modern world, and in a progressive civilization, he preferred a slave State of black men than a free democratic country where the black citizens could rise to the same opportunities as white citizens in their democracies?”

Marcus Garvey (1887–1940) Jamaica-born British political activist, Pan-Africanist, orator, and entrepreneur

The Failure of Haile Selassie as Emperor in The Blackman, April, 1937.

Men , God , War , People

“You called and cried out loud and shattered my deafness. You were radiant and resplendent, you put to flight my blindness. You were fragrant, and I drew in my breath and now pant after you. I tasted you, and I feel but hunger and thirst for you. You touched me, and I am set on fire to attain the peace which is yours.”

Aurelius Augustinus book Confessions

Confessions (c. 397)

Hunger , Peace , Feeling

“Tis time, my friend, ‘tis time!
For rest the heart is aching;
Days follow days in flight, and every day is taking
Fragments of being, while together you and I
Make plans to live. Look, all is dust, and we shall die.”

Aleksandr Pushkin (1799–1837) Russian poet

Tis Time, My Friend, l. 1-5 (1834).

Time , Heart

“From that time forth he believed that the wise man is one who never sets himself apart from other living things, whether they have speech or not, and in later years he strove long to learn what can be learned, in silence, from the eyes of animals, the flight of birds, the great slow gestures of trees.”

Ursula K. Le Guin (1929–2018) American writer

Source: Earthsea Books, A Wizard of Earthsea (1968), Chapter 5

Bird , Tree , Silence , Learning

“Much more naturally than you do: because flight is a much more natural consequence of fear than of hate. He doesn't flee men because he hates them, but because he is afraid of them. He doesn't flee them in order to harm them, but to try o escape the harm they wish to do to him. They, on the contrary, don't seek him through friendship, but through hate. They seek him and he flees from them just as in the wilderness of Africa, where there are few men and many tigers, the men flee the tigers, the men flee the tigers, and the tigers seek the men.”

Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) Genevan philosopher

Second Dialogue; translated by Judith R. Bush, Christopher Kelly, Roger D. Masters
Dialogues: Rousseau Judge of Jean-Jacques (published 1782)

Men , Hate , Friendship , Fear

“Beyond this vale of tears
There is a life above,
Unmeasured by the flight of years;
And all that life is love.”

James Montgomery (1771–1854) British editor, hymn writer, and poet

The Issues of Life and Death.
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).

Love , Life , Tear

“Tormented by spiritual thirst,
I dragged myself through a somber desert.
And a six-winged seraph
Appeared to meet me at the crossing of the ways.
He touched my eyes
With fingers as light as a dream:
And my prophetic eyes opened
Like those of a frightened eagle.
He touched my ears
And they were filled with noise and ringing:
And I heard the shuddering of the heavens,
And the flight of the angels in the heights,
And the movement of the beasts of the sea under the waters,
And the sound of the vine growing in the valley.
He bent down to my mouth
And tore out my tongue,
Sinful, decitful, and given to idle talk;
with the right hand steeped in blood
He inserted the tongue of a wise serpent,
Into my benumbed mouth.
He clove my breast with a sword,
And plucked out my quivering heart,
And thrust a coal of live fire
Into my gaping breast.
Like a corpse I lay in the desert.
And the voice of God called out to me:
'Arise, O prophet, see and hear,
Be filled with my will,
Go forth over land and sea,
And set the hearts of men on fire with your Word.”

Aleksandr Pushkin The Prophet

English translation found in New Society, Volume 8, (1966). New Society Limited. p. 413.
Also quoted by Kahn, Andrew (2006). The Cambridge Companion to Pushkin. Cambridge University Press, p. 84.
The Prophet (1826)

Men , God , Dreams , Angels

“The present life of man, O king, seems to me, in comparison of that time which is unknown to us, like to the swift flight of a sparrow through the room wherein you sit at supper in winter, with your commanders and ministers, and a good fire in the midst, whilst the storms of rain and snow prevail abroad; the sparrow, I say, flying in at one door, and immediately out at another, whilst he is within, is safe from the wintry storm; but after a short space of fair weather, he immediately vanishes out of your sight, into the dark winter from which he had emerged. So this life of man appears for a short space, but of what went before, or what is to follow, we are utterly ignorant. If, therefore, this new doctrine contains something more certain, it seems justly to deserve to be followed.”
Talis...mihi uidetur, rex, vita hominum praesens in terris, ad conparationem eius, quod nobis incertum est, temporis, quale cum te residente ad caenam cum ducibus ac ministris tuis tempore brumali, accenso quidem foco in medio, et calido effecto caenaculo, furentibus autem foris per omnia turbinibus hiemalium pluviarum vel nivium, adveniens unus passeium domum citissime pervolaverit; qui cum per unum ostium ingrediens, mox per aliud exierit. Ipso quidem tempore, quo intus est, hiemis tempestate non tangitur, sed tamen parvissimo spatio serenitatis ad momentum excurso, mox de hieme in hiemem regrediens, tuis oculis elabitur. Ita haec vita hominum ad modicum apparet; quid autem sequatur, quidue praecesserit, prorsus ignoramus. Unde si haec nova doctrina certius aliquid attulit, merito esse sequenda videtur.

Bede book Ecclesiastical History of the English People

Book II, chapter 13
This, Bede tells us, was the advice given to Edwin, King of Northumbria by one of his chief men, at a meeting where the king proposed that he and his followers should convert to Christianity. It followed a speech by the chief priest Coifi, who also spoke in favor of conversion.
Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum (Ecclesiastical History of the English People)

Life , Appearance , Winter , Time

“And in that moment we all thought of the space that her round arms would occupy moving backward and forward with the rolling pin over the dough, her bosom leaning over the great mound of flour and eggs, […] and we thought of the space the flour would occupy, and the wheat for the flour, and the fields to raise the wheat, and the mountains from which the water would flow to irrigate the fields; […] of the space it would take for the Sun to arrive with its rays, to ripen the wheat; of the space for the Sun to condense from the clouds of stellar gases and burn; of the quantities of stars and galaxies and galactic masses in flight through space which would be needed to hold suspended every galaxy, every nebula, every sun, every planet, and at the same time we thought of it, this space was inevitably being formed, at the same time that Mrs. Ph(i)Nk0 was uttering those words: "… ah, what noodles, boys!" the point that contained her and all of us was expanding in a halo of distance in light-years and light-centuries and billions of light-millennia, and we were being hurled to the four corners of the universe, […] and she, dissolved into I don't know what kind of energy-light-heat, she, Mrs. Ph(i)Nk0, she who in the midst of our closed, petty world had been capable of a generous impulse, "Boys, the noodles I would make for you!," a true outburst of general love, initiating at the same moment the concept of space and, properly speaking, space itself, and time, and universal gravitation, and the gravitating universe, making possible billions and billions of suns, and of planets, and fields of wheat, and Mrs. Ph(i)Nk0s, scattered through the continents of the planets, kneading with floury, oil-shiny, generous arms, and she lost at that very moment, and we, mourning her loss.”

Italo Calvino book Cosmicomics

Pages 46-47, "All at One Point".
Cosmicomics (1965)

Love , World , Mountain , Star

“Cages. Consider a birdcage. If you look very closely at just one wire in the cage, you cannot see the other wires. If your conception of what is before you is determined by this myopic focus, you could look at that one wire, up and down the length of it, and be unable to see why a bird would not just fly around the wire any time it wanted to go somewhere. Furthermore, even if, one day at a time, you myopically inspected each wire, you still could not see why a bird would have trouble going past the wires to get anywhere. There is no physical property of any one wire, nothing that the closest scrutiny could discover, that will reveal how a bird could be inhibited or harmed by it except in the most accidental way. It is only when you step back, stop looking at the wires one by one, microscopically, and take a macroscopic view of the whole cage, that you can see why the bird does not go anywhere; and then you will see it in a moment. It will require no great subtlety of mental powers. It is perfectly obvious that the bird is surrounded by a network of systematically related barriers, no one of which would be the least hindrance to its flight, but which, by their relations to each other, are as confining as the solid walls of a dungeon.”

Marilyn Frye (1941) feminist philosopher and professor

"Oppression", in Politics Of Reality – Essays In Feminist Theory (1983)

Way , Bird , Time , Past

“My son, I caution you to keep
The middle way, for if your pinions dip
Too low the waters may impede your flight;
And if they soar too high the sun may scorch them.
Fly midway.”
Insruit et natum: Medioque ut limite curras, Icare, ait, moneo. Ne, si demissior ibis, Unda gravet pennas; si celsior, ignis adurat. Inter utrumque vola.

Ovid Metamorphoses

Book VIII, lines 203–206; translation by Brooks More
Metamorphoses (Transformations)

Way , Water , Sun , Flying

“First words upon returning to Earth, to a woman and a girl near where his capsule landed (12 April 1961) The woman asked: "Can it be that you have come from outer space?" to which Gagarin replied: "As a matter of fact, I have!" As quoted in The Air Up There : More Great Quotations on Flight (2003) by Dave English, p. 118”

Yuri Gagarin (1934–1968) Soviet pilot and cosmonaut, the first human in space

Rays were blazing through the of the earth, the horizon became bright orange, gradually passing into all the colors of the rainbow: from light blue to dark blue, to violet and then to black. What an indescribable gamut of colors! Just like the paintings of the artist Nicholas Roerich.

Quotes , Girl

“Is this even possible today?-But some day, in a stronger age than this decaying, self-doubting present, he must yet come to us, the redeeming man of great love and contempt, the creative spirit whose compeHing strength will not let him rest in any aloofness or any beyond, whose isolation is misunderstood by the people as if it were flight from reality-while it is only his' absorption, immersion, penetration into reality, so that, when he one day emerges again into the light, he may bring home the redemption of this reality: its redemption from the curse that the hitherto reigning ideal has laid upon it. This man of the future, who will redeem us not only from the hitherto reigning ideal but also from that which was bound to grow out of it, the great nausea, the will to nothingness, nihilism; this bell-stroke of noon and of the great decision that liberates the will again and restores its goal to the earth and his hope to man; this Antichrist and antinihilist; this victor over God and nothingness- he must come one day.”

Friedrich Nietzsche book On the Genealogy of Morality

Essay 2, Aphorism 24
On the Genealogy of Morality (1887)

Love , God , People , Age

“Music is a moral law. It gives a soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination, a charm to sadness, gaiety and life to everything. It is the essence of order, and leads to all that is good, just, and beautiful, of which it is the invisible, but nevertheless dazzling, passionate, and eternal form.”

Plato (-427–-347 BC) Classical Greek philosopher

This quotation is not known to exist in Plato's writings. It apparently first appeared as a quotation attributed to Plato in The Pleasures of Life, Part II by Sir John Lubbock (Macmillan and Company, London and New York), published in 1889.
Misattributed

Life , Sadness , Law , Beauty

“And God stands winding His lonely horn,
And time and the world are ever in flight;
And love is less kind than the grey twilight,
And hope is less dear than the dew of the morn.”

W.B. Yeats (1865–1939) Irish poet and playwright

Into The Twilight http://poetry.poetryx.com/poems/1519/, st. 4
The Wind Among the Reeds (1899)

Love , God , World , Hope

“Through it all I learned the value of being humble to the dust, reduced to ashes. Everyone should experience that. Before you can recognize you're somebody, you have to know you're nobody. [-] The butterfly was just a lowly worm in its beginning. The worm didn't live with the moment-to-moment expectation of sprouting wings and taking flight. He lived a useful and productive life, the life of a worm. And he had to die a worm in order to be born as an angel! The spinning of the cocoon is, in and of itself, remarkable. It is as wondrous as the emergence and first flight of the butterfly.”

Henry Miller (1891–1980) American novelist

Reflections (1981)

Life , Angels , Learning

“I think I stand as much chance of dying in front of a firing squad or in a gas chamber as you do being killed on a plane flight home. Let's hope you don't.”

Ted Bundy (1946–1989) American serial killer

1977 interview https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AEWsxCrMM1U in Pitkin County Prison, Colorado

Hope , Home , Thinking , Chance

“Haste is universal because everyone is in flight from himself.”

Friedrich Nietzsche Untimely Meditations

trans. Hollingdale (1983), “Schopenhauer as educator,” p. 158
Untimely Meditations (1876)

Universe

“The empire of Saturnus is gone by;
Lord of the secret birth of things is he;
Within the lap of earth, and in the depths
Of the imagination dominates;
And his are all things that eschew the light.
The time is o'er of brooding and contrivance,
For Jupiter, the lustrous, lordeth now,
And the dark work, complete of preparation,
He draws by force into the realm of light.
Now must we hasten on to action, ere
The scheme, and most auspicious positure
Parts o'er my head, and takes once more its flight,
For the heavens journey still, and adjourn not.”

Friedrich Schiller Wallenstein

Act I, sc. i
Wallenstein (1798), Part II - Wallensteins Tod (The Death of Wallenstein)

Secret , Imagination , Birth , Light

“Even with all our technological accomplishments and urban sophistication, we consider ourselves blessed, healed in some manner, forgiven, and for a moment transported into some other world, when we catch a passing glimpse of an animal in the wild: a deer in some woodland, a fox crossing a field, a butterfly in its dancing flight southward to its wintering region, a hawk soaring in the distant sky, a hummingbird come into our garden, fireflies signaling to each other in the evening. So we might describe the thousandfold moments when we experience our meetings with the animals in their unrestrained and undomesticated status. Such incidents as these remind us that the universe is composed of subjects to be communed with, not of objects to be exploited.”

Thomas Berry (1914–2009) American priest

Source: Evening Thoughts, Chapter 3, pp. 37-38

World , Communication , Universe , Distant

“In love the only safety is in flight.”

Napoleon I of France (1769–1821) French general, First Consul and later Emperor of the French

Napoleon : In His Own Words (1916)

Love

“Men are in error when they lament the flight of time, accusing it of being too swift, and not perceiving that it is sufficient as it passes; but good memory, with which nature has endowed us, causes things long past to seem present.”

Leonardo Da Vinci (1452–1519) Italian Renaissance polymath

The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci (1883), XIX Philosophical Maxims. Morals. Polemics and Speculations.

Men , Error , Nature , Memory

“Don't get involved in partial problems, but always take flight to where there is a free view over the whole single great problem, even if this view is still not a clear one.”

Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) Austrian-British philosopher

Journal entry (1 November 1914)
1910s, Notebooks 1914-1916

Problem

“Fantasy, if it's really convincing, can't become dated, for the simple reason that it represents a flight into a dimension that lies beyond the reach of time.”

Walt Disney (1901–1966) American film producer and businessman

As quoted in "The Rides of Passage" in Via magazine (July 2005)
Context: Fantasy, if it's really convincing, can't become dated, for the simple reason that it represents a flight into a dimension that lies beyond the reach of time. In this new dimension, whatever it is, nothing corrodes or gets run down at the heel or gets to look ridiculous like, say, the celluloid collar or the bustle.

Time

“Let us then willingly take the Eternal with us in our flight among the suns and stars.
Experience is our great teacher, and on this point it is wholly wanting.”

Julia Ward Howe (1819–1910) American abolitionist, social activist, and poet

Beyond the Veil
Context: Life passes, but the conditions of life do not. Air, food, water, the moral sense, the mathematical problem and its solution. These things wait upon one generation much as they did upon its predecessor. What, too, is this wonderful residuum which refuses to disappear when the very features of time seem to succumb to the law of change, and we recognize our world no more? Whence comes this system in which man walks as in an artificial frame, every weight and lever of which must correspond with the outlines of an eternal pattern?
Our spiritual life appears to include three terms in one. They are ever with us, this Past which does not pass, this Future which never arrives. They are part and parcel of this conscious existence which we call Present. While Past and Future have each their seasons of predominance, both are contained in the moment which is gone while we say, "It is here."
So the Eternal is with us, whether we will or not, and the idea of God is inseparable from the persuasion of immortality; the Being which, perfect in itself, can neither grow nor decline, nor indeed undergo any change whatever. The great Static of the universe, the rationale of the steadfast faith of believing souls, the sense of beauty which justifies our high enjoyments, the sense of proportion which upholds all that we can think about ourselves and our world, the sense of permanence which makes the child in very truth parent to the man, able to solve the deepest riddle, the profoundest problem in all that is. Let us then willingly take the Eternal with us in our flight among the suns and stars.
Experience is our great teacher, and on this point it is wholly wanting. No one on the farther side of the great Divide has been able to inform those on the hither side of what lies beyond.

Star , Teachers , Sun

“Music is a moral law. It gives soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination, and charm and gaiety to life and to everything.”

Axel Munthe (1857–1949) Swedish physician

Source: supanet.com/find/famous-quotes-by/axel-munthe/a-man-can-stand-a-lot-as-fqb50991/

Soul , Imagination , Law , Universe

“The Jewish Nigger, Lassalle… It is now quite plain to me — as the shape of his head and the way his hair grows also testify — that he is descended from the negroes who accompanied Moses’ flight from Egypt (unless his mother or paternal grandmother interbred with a nigger).”

Karl Marx (1818–1883) German philosopher, economist, sociologist, journalist and revolutionary socialist

Now, this blend of Jewishness and Germanness, on the one hand, and basic negroid stock, on the other, must inevitably give rise to a peculiar product. The fellow’s importunity is also nigger-like.
Marx to Engels in Manchester http://hiaw.org/defcon6/works/1862/letters/62_07_30a.html (30 July 1862), MECW Volume 41, p. 388; first published: abridged in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Stuttgart, 1913, and in full in MEGA, Berlin, 1930.

Way

“One must indeed be ignorant of the methods of genius to suppose that it allows itself to be cramped by forms. Forms are for mediocrity, and it is fortunate that mediocrity can act only according to routine. Ability takes its flight unhindered.”

Napoleon I of France (1769–1821) French general, First Consul and later Emperor of the French

Napoleon : In His Own Words (1916)

“I would say I'm good at organizing things, like trips or vacations. I'm always the one to book the flights, and do things like that. I like to do my research. I wouldn't say I'm a super type A personality, but I like to be organized when it comes to travel and vacation.”

Alex Morgan (1989) American soccer player

"The Advice Alex Morgan Would Give Her Daughter About Getting Into Sports" https://www.romper.com/life/alex-morgan-olympics-daughter-interview (July 10, 2021)

Personality , Books , Travel

“Indulge your imagination in every possible flight.”

Jane Austen (1775–1817) English novelist

Imagination

“Most people have two emergency modes. Fight and Flight. But Conner always knew he had three. Fight, Flight, and Screw Up Royally.”

Neal Shusterman book Unwind

Source: Unwind

People , Fight

“We are all in flight from the real reality. That is the basic definition of Homo Sapiens.”

John Fowles book The French Lieutenant's Woman

Source: The French Lieutenant's Woman

Reality

“Any problems with your flight? (Acheron)
I didn’t eat my pilot if that’s what you mean. And little Nicky here is still breathing and not bleeding. (Zarek)”

Sherrilyn Kenyon Night Embrace

Source: Night Embrace

Problem

“The heights by great men reached and kept
Were not attained by sudden flight,
But they, while their companions slept,
Were toiling upward in the night.”

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807–1882) American poet

The Ladder of St. Augustine, st. 10.
Source: Good Poems for Hard Times

Back To Work , Men , Night

“Footsteps in the snow
suggest where you have been,
point to where you were going:
but when they suddenly vanish,
never dismiss the possibility
of flight…”

Diane Duane (1952) American author

“If the black box flight recorder is never damaged during a plane crash, why isn’t the whole airplane made out of that stuff?”

George Carlin (1937–2008) American stand-up comedian

Box

“How do you get off a non-stop flight?”

Steven Wright (1955) American actor and author

“I saw doves and I thought they were rocks, but they were asleep. My breath made them stir, and they rocks took flight, the earth exploding… and my only thought was that I wanted you to see them, too.”

Douglas Coupland Microserfs

Source: Microserfs

“The lions sing and the hills take flight.
The moon by day, and the sun by night.
Blind woman, deaf man, jackdaw fool.
Let the Lord of Chaos rule.”

Robert Jordan Lord of Chaos

Chant from a children’s game heard in Great Arvalon, the Fourth Age
(15 October 1994)
Source: Lord of Chaos

Fools , Singing , Sun , Night

“Goodnight sweet prince, may flights of devils wing you to your rest.”

Anne Rice (1941) American writer

“The owl of Minerva takes its flight only when the shades of night are gathering.”

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel book Elements of the Philosophy of Right

Preface xxx
Variant: When philosophy paints its grey on grey, then has a shape of life grown old. By philosophy's grey on grey it cannot be rejuvenated but only understood. The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk.
As translated by T. M. Knox, (1952) 
Source: Elements of the Philosophy of Right (1820/1821)
Context: Only one word more concerning the desire to teach the world what it ought to be. For such a purpose philosophy at least always comes too late. Philosophy, as the thought of the world, does not appear until reality has completed its formative process, and made itself ready. History thus corroborates the teaching of the conception that only in the maturity of reality does the ideal appear as counterpart to the real, apprehends the real world in its substance, and shapes it into an intellectual kingdom. When philosophy paints its grey in grey, one form of life has become old, and by means of grey it cannot be rejuvenated, but only known. The owl of Minerva takes its flight only when the shades of night are gathering.

Night

“Books are meat and medicine
and flame and flight and flower
steel, stitch, cloud and clout,
and drumbeats on the air.”

Gwendolyn Brooks (1917–2000) American writer

Books , Flowers

“In every message she spoke of birds, of flight, of the world away. Even back then, she flew against what was presented to her. I wanted to cling to her wings and soar, no matter how intimidated I was.”

Lisa See book Snow Flower and the Secret Fan

Source: Snow Flower and the Secret Fan

World , 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.”

Richard Bach book Jonathan Livingston Seagull

Source: Jonathan Livingston Seagull (1970)

Food , Learning

“Flight is essential, but I can't let my fear show.”

Suzanne Collins (1962) American television writer and novelist

Fear

“When a man is born… there are nets flung at it to hold it back from flight. You talk to me of nationality, language, religion. I shall try to fly by those nets.”

James Joyce book A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

Source: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

Religion , Flying

“I dream of flight, not to be as the angels are, but to rise above the smallness of it all. The smallnesss that I am. Against the daily death the iconography of wings.”

Jeanette Winterson (1959) English writer

Source: Art and Lies

Death , Dreams , Angels

“Fight, flight, and screw up royaly.”

Neal Shusterman book Unwind

Source: Unwind

Fight

“travel [is] flight and pursuit in equal parts.”

Paul Theroux book The Great Railway Bazaar

Source: The Great Railway Bazaar

Travel , Parting

“Thus my life is a flight and I lose everything and everything belongs to oblivion, or to him.”

Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986) Argentine short-story writer, essayist, poet and translator, and a key figure in Spanish language literature

Life

“It was a love of perpetual flight.”

Gabriel García Márquez (1927–2014) Colombian writer

Love

“The secret of flight is this -- you have to do it immediately, before your body realizes it is defying the laws.”

Michael Cunningham book A Home at the End of the World

Source: A Home at the End of the World

Secret , Law

“She had made the choice for him - in a moment of flight and panic, but she had made it - not realizing that her Jace would rather die than be like this, and that she'd been not so much saving his life as damning him to an existence he would despise.”

Cassandra Clare The City of Lost Souls

Source: City of Lost Souls

Life

“This is your captain speaking. Welcome aboard flight… one, from… here to there. We'll be cruising at a height of ten feet, going up to twelve and a half feet if we see anything big. And our copilot today is a flask of coffee.”

Eddie Izzard (1962) British stand-up comedian, actor and writer

Coffee

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

Richard Bach book Jonathan Livingston Seagull

Source: Jonathan Livingston Seagull (1970)

Flying

“Be like the bird that, passing on her flight awhile on boughs too slight, feels them give way beneath her, and yet sings, knowing that she hath wings.”

Victor Hugo (1802–1885) French poet, novelist, and dramatist

Way , Feeling , Bird , Singing

“In you is the illusion of each day.
You arrive like the dew to the cupped flowers.
You undermine the horizon with your absence.
Eternally in flight like the wave.”

Pablo Neruda book Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair

Source: Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair

Flowers

“Pardon all runners,
All speechless, alien winds,
All mad waters.

Pardon their impulses,
Their wild attitudes,
Their young flights, their reticence.

When a message has no clothes on
How can it be spoken.”

Thomas Merton (1915–1968) Priest and author

Water , Madness , Clothes

“He was not bone and feather but a perfect idea of freedom and flight, limited by nothing at all”

Richard Bach book Jonathan Livingston Seagull

Source: Jonathan Livingston Seagull

Idea , Freedom , Perfection

“Can I love someone… and still think/fly? Love is flying, sown, floating. Thought is solitary flight, beating wings.”

Susan Sontag (1933–2004) American writer and filmmaker, professor, and activist

Source: As Consciousness is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals and Notebooks, 1964-1980

Love , Thinking , Flying

“As birds' wings beat the solid air without which none could fly so words freed by the imagination affirm reality by their flight.”

William Carlos Williams book Spring and All

Source: Spring and All

Imagination , Bird , Reality , Flying

“One has not lived until one has carried a sixty-pound dog down a sweeping flight of stairs at half-past V in the morning.”

Connie Willis book To Say Nothing of the Dog

Source: To Say Nothing of the Dog

Dogs , Past

“So rapid is the flight of dreams upon the wings of imagination.”

Alexandre Dumas (1802–1870) French writer and dramatist, father of the homonym writer and dramatist

Dreams , Imagination

“A pity to survive night flights over St. Georges Channel only to crack my skull falling from a ladder.”

Eoin Colfer book Airman

Source: Airman

Night

“I am lost without you. I am soulless, a drifter without a home, a solitary bird in a flight to nowhere. I am all these things, and I am nothing at all. This, my darling, is my life without you. I long for you to show me how to live again.”

Nicholas Sparks book Message in a Bottle

Source: Message in a Bottle

Life , Home , Bird

“This is thy hour O Soul, thy free flight into the wordless,
Away from books, away from art, the day erased, the lesson done,
Thee fully forth emerging, silent, gazing, pondering the themes thou lovest best.
Night, sleep, and the stars.”

Walt Whitman book Fulles d'herba

Source: Leaves of Grass

Books , Art , Soul , Star

“The single simplest reason why human space flight is necessary is this, stated as plainly as possible: keeping all your breeding pairs in one place is a retarded way to run a species.”

Warren Ellis (1968) English comics and fiction writer

Way

“While no politician or political system can ever afford to yield understandably and enthusiastically to their adversaries and opposers, all politicians can and will yield enthusiastically to the computers safe flight-controlling capabilities in bringing all of humanity in for a happy landing.”

Buckminster Fuller (1895–1983) American architect, systems theorist, author, designer, inventor and futurist

1960s, Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth (1963)

Understanding , Happiness

“When the ceremony ended Anne and I stayed on the field to greet friends, many of whom had traveled to share the ceremony with us. In one respect it was a difficult day at the end of a difficult month. But in the broader view of life, it was a magical evening at the end of an incredible journey we shared. We walked back over to the quarters we would move out of a few days later, and found friends in the yard and almost every room. At one point I saw Mike Hall, Charlie Flynn, Shawn Lowery, and Casey Welch standing in the fading summer light. I thought of my father, of my first day at West Point, and of our cold Christmas Eve flight over Afghanistan seven months before. The final words of my last speech in uniform, spoken just an hour before were repeated in my mind: "If I had it to do over again, I'd do some things in my career differently, but not many. I believed in people, and I still believe in them. I trusted and I still trust. I cared and I still care. I wouldn't have it any other way… To the young leaders of today and tomorrow, it's a great life. Thank you."”

Stanley A. McChrystal (1954) American general

Closing words, p. 394
My Share Of The Task (2013)

Life , People , Way , Travel

“I loathe the urchin’s cruelty to the cat, but I will not loathe the urchin. I loathe Hitler’s mass-torturing, but not Hitler; and the money-man’s heartlessness, but not the man. I love the swallow’s flight, and I love the swallow; the urchin’s gleam of tenderness, and the urchin.”

Olaf Stapledon (1886–1950) British novelist and philosopher

Other texts
Source: The Core, in: An Olaf Stapledon Reader, Syracuse University Press, New York 1997: pp. 266-272.

Love , Money , Cats

“One of the difficulties in thinking about software is its huge variety. A function definition in a spreadsheet cell is software. A smartphone app is software. The flight management system for an Airbus A380 is software. A word processor is software. We shouldn't expect a single discipline of software engineering to cover all of these, any more than we expect a single discipline of manufacturing to cover everything from the Airbus A380 to the production of chocolate bars, or a single discipline of social organization to cover everything from the United Nations to a kindergarten. Improvement in software engineering must come bottom-up, from intense specialized attention to particular products.”

Michael A. Jackson (1936) British computer scientist

Michael A. Jackson in: K. De Grave (ed.) Formalism & Intuition in Software Development; A conversation with Michael A. Jackson conducted by Edgar G. Daylight and Bas van Vlijmen. 2015

Thinking