Richard Bach

“Have you ever felt so at one with the world, with the universe, with everything that is, that you were overcome with love? That is reality. That is the truth. What we make of it is up to us, as the painting of the sunrise is up to the artist. In our world humanity has strayed from that love. It lives hatred and power struggles and manipulations of the earth itself for its own narrow reasons. Continue and no one will see the sunrise. The sunrise will always exist, of course, but people on earth will know nothing of it and finally even stories of its beauty will fade from our knowing.”

“Why? What is so wonderful about mass murder that nobody in the history of the world has ever fond any smarter solution to problems than killing everybody who doesn’t agree? Is that the limit of human intelligence?”

“You are life, inventing form. No more can you die on sword or years than you can die on doorways through which you walk, one room into another. Every room gives its word for you to speak, every passage its song for you to sing.”

“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.”

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

“There’s no disaster that can’t become a blessing, and no blessing that can’t become a disaster.”

“Any powerful idea is absolutely fascinating and absolutely useless until we choose to use it.”

“We are each given a block of marble when we begin a lifetime, and the tools to shape it into sculpture. We can drag it behind us untouched, we can pound it to gravel, we can shape it into glory. Examples from every other life are left for us to see, lifeworks finished and unfinished, guiding and warning. Near the end our sculpture is nearly finished, and we can smooth and polish what we started years before. We can make our progress then, but to do it we must see past the appearances of age.”

“One challenge of our adventure on earth is to rise above dead systems...wars, nations, destructions...to refuse to be a part of them, and express the highest selves we know how to be.”

“Character comes from following our highest sense of right, from trusting ideas without being sure they’ll work.”

“Every choice is made in the uncaring blind, no guarantees from the world around us.”

“There are grand rewards for those who pick the high hard roads, but those rewards are hidden by years.”

“A tiny change today brings a dramatically different tomorrow.”

“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.”

“Wrong turns are as important as right turns. More important, sometimes.”

“In half a century of challenge and learning and trial-and-error, each of us had struggled from hard times to a present lovely beyond our dreams.”

“How is it we’re the lucky ones, living a life that the children-we-were took for dreams?”

“And behind it lies not blind chance but a principle that works to help us understand, a thousand "coincidences" and friends come to show us the way when the problem seems too hard to solve alone. Problems for overcoming. Freedom for proving. And, as long as we believe in our dream, nothing by chance.”

“At last, the answer why. The lesson that had been so hard to find, so difficult to learn, came quick and clear and simple. The reason for problems is to overcome them. Why, that’s the very nature of man, I thought, to press past limits, to prove his freedom. It isn’t the challenge that faces us, that determines who we are and what we are becoming, but the way we meet the challenge, whether we toss a match at the wreck or work our way through it, step by step, to freedom.”

“Were we, also, hiking along some cosmic journal page? Were the events about us all part of a message we could understand, if only we found the right perspective from which to read them? Somehow, with our long series of miracles, I thought so.”

“It’s not when you start that makes your success in the world, but when you quit.”

“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.”

“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.”

“That’s why love stories don’t have endings! They don’t have endings because love doesn’t end.”

“What a delighted fascination it is, to stand aside and watch our dearest friend perform on stage without us.”

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

“Next to ‘God’, ‘love’ is the word most mangled in every language.”

“Why had such a promising world been crucified on the tree of obligation, thorned by duties, hanged by hypocrisy, smothered by customs?”

“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.”

“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.”

“The only thing that shatters dreams is compromise.”

“Look in the mirror and one thing is sure: what we see is not who we are.”

“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.”

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

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

“You are never given a wish without also being given the power to make it come true.”

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

“Whatever enchants also guides and protects.”

“What the caterpillar calls the end of the world, the master calls a butterfly.”

“We teach best what we most need to learn.”

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

“From time to time it's fun to close our eyes, and in that dark say to ourselves, 'I am the sorcerer, and when I open my eyes I shall see a world that I have created, and for which I and only I am completely responsible.' Slowly then, eyelids open like curtains lifting stage-center. And sure enough, there's our world, just the way we've built it.”

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

“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.”

“You're never given a dream without also being given the power to make it true.”

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

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

“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?”

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

“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.”