589+ Best Flying Quotes About Flying Through The Skies

In the vast canvas of human experience, few sensations rival the exhilarating freedom and boundless wonder of taking flight. From the soaring heights of the skies to the untamed realms of imagination, the act of flying has captivated the human spirit for centuries. Just as clouds intermittently sprawl above, some of the best flying quotes echo cyclically through our history. Whether through the graceful wings of birds or the engineering marvels of airplanes, the concept of defying gravity has inspired poets, adventurers, and dreamers alike. As we embark on a journey through the clouds of wisdom, let us explore the best quotes about flying that encapsulate the awe, joy, and profound reflections that this remarkable act evokes.

589+ Best Flying Quotes About Flying Through The Skies

Aaron Carter – It felt like I was in the air forever, flying like Superman.
Aaron Neville – I’ve been in some beautiful places, but the prettiest sight is flying back to New Orleans. Being able to look down and say, ‘I know where I am now.’
Abdul Kalam – All Birds find shelter during a rain. But Eagle avoids rain by flying above the Clouds. Problems are common, but attitude makes the difference!!!
Adolf Galland – Flying is more than a sport and more than a job; flying is pure passion and desire, which fill a lifetime.
Adolf Galland – For the first time I was flying by jet propulsion. No engine vibrations. No torque and no lashing sound of the propeller. Accompanied by a whistling sound, my jet shot through the air. Later when asked what it felt like, I said, ‘It felt as though angels were pushing.’
Agnes Obel – When I’m flying, I really like to listen to piano music. Something impressionistic, loud and beautiful. Flying can be such a claustrophobic experience, it’s nice to open that up a bit with music.
Alan Alda – For humans, flying isn’t magic, it’s physics.
Alan Bean – Test pilots have a litmus test for evaluating problems. When something goes wrong, they ask, “Is this thing still flying?” If the answer is yes, then there’s no immediate danger, no need to overreact.
Alan Moore – Do I believe, for example, that by using magic I could fly? No. How would you get around gravity? Impossible. Do I believe that I might be able to project my consciousness into a very, very vivid simulation of flying? Yeah. Yes, I’ve done that. Yes, that works.
Alan Perry – There’s no better way to test an idea than to take it outside and see if it flies.
Alan Tudyk – I definitely knew how to fly. That’s something you don’t forget. One spaceship is pretty much like another when it comes to flying.
Albert Einstein – Thinking is to man what flying is to birds. Don’t follow the example of a chicken when you could be a lark.
Alberto Santos-Dumont – I cannot describe the delight, the wonder and intoxication, of this free diagonal movement onward and upward, or onward and downward….The birds have this sensation when they spread their wings and go tobogganing in curves and spirals through the sky.
Alex James – There is a thrill of vulnerability at all airshows. There is no way of making everything completely safe. When the machines are being thrashed to capacity and the pilots are flying at their limits to dazzle, things are bound to go wrong sometimes. There have been some historic disasters, but the danger is a part of the attraction.
Alexander Chase – Lovers of air travel find it exhilarating to hang poised between the illusion of immortality and the fact of death.
Alexander Pope – Fly, dotard, fly! With thy wise dreams and fables of the sky.
Alfred Worden – Quietly, like a night bird, floating, soaring, wingless. We glide from shore to shore, curving and falling but not quite touching; Earth: a distant memory seen in an instant of repose, crescent shaped, ethereal, beautiful, I wonder which part is home, but I know it doesn’t matter… the bond is there in my mind and memory; Earth: a small, bubbly balloon hanging delicately in the nothingness of space.
Allan Lockheed – We are coming into a new era of flight, an era in which all past conception of time and distance is changing and changing at a very, very rapid rate.
Amado Nervo – Don’t do anything to stop a woman from flying; let fate take its course.
Amanda Peet – I think getting drunk is the key to flying comfortably. A couple of bloody marys or several glasses of champagne, and suddenly it’s like you’re on a roller coaster.
Amelia Earhart – As flying enters into everyday life, the dreams of centuries become actualities. One by one they take shape and become stepping-stones for other dreams.
Amelia Earhart – Aviation, this young modern giant, exemplifies the possible relationship of women and the creations of science. Although women have not taken full advantage of its use and benefits, air travel is as available to them as to men.
Amelia Earhart – Everyone has oceans to fly, if they have the heart to do it. Is it reckless? Maybe. But what do dreams know of boundaries?
Amelia Earhart – Flying might not be all plain sailing, but the fun of it is worth the price.
Amelia Earhart – I have often said that the lure of flying is the lure of beauty, and I need no other flight to convince me that the reasons flyers fly, whether they know it or not, is the aesthetic appeal of flying.
Amelia Earhart – I lay no claim to advancing scientific data other than advancing flying knowledge. I can only say that I do it because I want to.
Amelia Earhart – Ours is the commencement of a flying age, and I am happy to have popped into existence at a period so interesting.
Amelia Earhart – The lure of flying is the lure of beauty. The dramas of the clouds, the glory of the stars, the charm of landscapes and the wonders of the waters and skies have, to me, an irresistible appeal.
Amelia Earhart – The stars seemed near enough to touch and never before have i seen so many. i always believed the lure of flying is the lure of beauty, but i was sure of it that night.
Amelia Earhart – Women must pay for everything. They do get more glory than men for comparable feats, but, they also get more notoriety when they crash.
Amelia Earhart – I learned the discipline of flying in order to have the freedom of flight.
Amelia Earhart – You haven’t seen a tree until you’ve seen its shadow from the sky.
Amy Johnson – I think it is a pity to lose the romantic side of flying and simply to accept it as a common means of transport, although that end is what we have all ostensibly been striving to attain.
Anne Fortier – “There is a trick to flying. The angels told me.” He had smiled at my wide-eyed awe. “You need to forget everything you know as a human being. When you are human, you discover that there is great power in hating the earth. And it can almost make you fly. But it never will.” I had frowned, not quite understanding him. “So, what’s the trick?” “Love the sky.”
Anne Lamott – My idea of everything going smoothly on an airplane is (a) that I not die in a slow-motion fiery crash or get stabbed to death by terrorists and (b) that none of the other passengers try to talk to me. All conversation should end at the moment the wheels leave the ground.
Anne Morrow Lindbergh – 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 – Flying was a very tangible freedom. In those days, it was beauty, adventure, discovery – the epitome of breaking into new worlds.
Anne Morrow Lindbergh – I was conscious again of the fundamental magic of flying, a miracle that has nothing to do with any of its practical purposes — purposes of speed, accessibility, and convenience — and will not change as they change … For not only is life put into new patterns from the air, but it is somehow arrested, frozen into form … A glaze is put over life. There is no flaw, no crack in the surface; a still reservoir, no ripple on its face.
Anne Morrow Lindbergh – Splutter, splutter. Yes – we’re off – we’re rising. But why start off with an engine like that? But it smooths out now, like a long sigh, like a person breathing easily, freely. Like someone singing ecstatically, climbing, soaring – sustained note of power and joy. We turn from the lights of the city; we pivot on a dark wing; we roar over the earth. The plane seems exultant now, even arrogant. We did it, we did it! we’re up, above you. We were dependant on you just now, prisoners fawning on you for favors, for wind and light. But now, we are free. We are up; we are off. We can toss you aside, for we are above it.
Anne Morrow Lindbergh – These bright roofs, these steep towers, these jewel-lakes, these skeins of railroad line – all spoke to her and she answered. She was glad they were there. She belonged to them and they to her. . . . She had not lost it. She was touching it with her fingertips. This was flying: to go swiftly over the earth you loved, touching it lightly with your fingertips, holding the railroads lines in your hand to guide you, like a skein of wool in a spider-web game – like following Ariadne’s thread through the Minotaur’s maze, Where would it lead, where?
Anne Morrow Lindbergh – Travelers are always discoverers, especially those who travel by air. There are no signposts in the sky to show a man has passed that way before. There are no channels marked. The flier breaks each second into new uncharted seas.
Anonymous – To most people, the sky is the limit. To those who love aviation, the sky is home.
Antoine de Saint-Exupery – I fly because it releases my mind from the tyranny of petty things.
Aristotle – If everything when it occupies an equal space is at rest, and if that which is in locomotion is always occupying such a space at any moment, the flying arrow is therefore motionless.
Arnold Palmer – I can’t afford the luxury of music while I’m flying an airplane. I have to pay attention to what I’m doing.
Arnold Palmer – I started [flying] by being scared. When I was an amateur I played a couple tournaments and I had to fly, and got into weather and stuff, and it scared me, and I decided that would not work, I had to learn to fly, I had to find out about airplanes and aeronautical engineering and what it was all about.
Arnold Palmer – I would not have been able to accomplish a lot of what I did professionally had I not learned to fly myself and owned an airplane. For example, I was able to fly to an exhibition for the day and be back home in time for dinner. I never would have been able to do that flying commercially.
Arnold Palmer – In my early days of flying, if you flew on instruments, you were inevitably going to fly in thunderstorms. That was just a part of the business of flying.
Arthur P. Warner – I thought I would keep it on the ground until I became familiar with it, but on account of the wind, I unexpectedly took to the air, and the first thing I knew, I was flying.
Austin Miller – Man’s flight through life is sustained by the power of his knowledge.
Ayala Malakh-Pines – If falling in love is like taking off or flying, then love is like landing.

Barack Obama – Cutting the deficit by gutting our investments in innovation and education is like lightening an overloaded airplane by removing its engine. It may make you feel like you’re flying high at first, but it won’t take long before you feel the impact.
Barbara Cushman Rowell – That this tiny two-seater box of metal managed to rise into the air at all felt unbelievable. Once we broke ground, it seemed as if I were floating on a magic carpet. The lightness and height made me tingle in somewhat the same way I feel aroused before making love. When I took over the controls, I felt as if I were at the center of my universe instead of orbiting someone else’s. I felt then, and still believe now, that piloting a small aircraft is about as good as it gets.
Baroness Raymonde de Laroche – Flying does not rely so much on strength, as on physical and mental co-ordination.
Barry Goldwater – Any pilot can describe the mechanics of flying. What it can do for the spirit of man is beyond description.
Ben Parr – Point-to-point transit via low orbit could dramatically speed up international flights, connecting the world even further. And safe, consistent space travel opens up the possibility of commercial space stations, trips to the moon and exploration beyond.
Benoit Mandelbrot – If you look at coastlines, if you look at that them from far away, from an airplane, well, you don’t see details, you see a certain complication. When you come closer, the complication becomes more local, but again continues. And come closer and closer and closer, the coastline becomes longer and longer and longer because it has more detail entering in.
Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle – The Art of Flying is but newly invented, ’twill improve by degrees, and in time grow perfect; then we may fly as far as the Moon.
Bertrand Piccard – I am with the angels and just completely happy.
Bertrand Piccard – Nothing can prevent us from another day and night, and the myth of perpetual flight.
Beryl Markham – For all professional pilots there exists a kind of guild, without charter and without by-laws. It demands no requirements for inclusion save an understanding of the wind, the compass, the rudder, and fair fellowship.
Bessie Coleman – I decided blacks should not have to experience the difficulties I had faced, so I decided to open a flying school and teach other black women to fly.
Bessie Coleman – The air is the only place free from prejudices.
Beth Ditto – As with most phobias, the fear of flying does make some sense, but if ever there was a fear worth quashing then this is it. After all, life is short, and there’s a great big world to explore out there.
Betsy Byars – My husband has some very interesting hobbies, and through him, I’ve learned to fly and earned my pilot’s license. Together, we fly all over the United States. Since our children are all grown now, we also travel a great deal in Europe, but we take commercial flights because our plane is not really equipped to make transatlantic flights.
Bill Bryson – I hadn’t realized quite how extraordinary Charles Lindbergh’s achievement was in flying the Atlantic alone. He had never flown over open water before, but he flew straight to Dingle Bay in Ireland and then on to Paris, exactly as planned.
Bill Engvall – Can someone explain to me why pilots feel they need to wake everyone to tell us that we are flying by a cloud that looks like a monkey.
Bill Gates – I’ve always been amazed by Da Vinci, because he worked out science on his own. He would work by drawing things and writing down his ideas. Of course, he designed all sorts of flying machines way before you could actually build something like that.
Bill Nye – If you meet somebody who says he or she has never dreamed of flying, I don’t believe you. I mean, they’re lying.
Billy Bob Thornton – I don’t have a fear of flying; I have a fear of crashing.
Billy Collins – Now I would say at any given moment in American life, there are probably 45 poets in airplanes vectoring across the country heading towards… I don’t know if anyone’s reading it, but poets are still flying around the country going from lectern to lectern. That circuitry has become very well-established.
Bo Jackson – The only thing I would change is during the summer – when I was working my summer job, if I was smart, I would have taken flying lessons at Auburn.
Bob Blumer – The more I fly, the more I’m convinced that the true wonder of modern aviation is the transformation of tasteless particles into something known as airplane food.
Bob Hoover – I don’t think I possess any skill that anyone else doesn’t have. I’ve just had perhaps more of an opportunity, more of an exposure, and been fortunate to survive a lot of situations that many other weren’t so lucky to make it. It’s not how close can you get to the ground, but how precise can you fly the airplane. If you feel so careless with your life that you want to be the world’s lowest flying aviator you might do it for a while. But there are a great many former friends of mine who are no longer with us simply because they cut their margins too close.
Bob Hope – I love flying. I’ve been to almost as many places as my luggage.
Brian Shul – 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.
Bruce Gould – Every time you go aloft you are the king at a command performance of the world’s magnificence.
Bruce Gould – 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 Schneier – Air travel survived decades of terrorism, including attacks which resulted in the deaths of everyone on the plane. It survived 9/11. It’ll survive the next successful attack. The only real worry is that we’ll scare ourselves into making air travel so onerous that we won’t fly anymore.
Burt Rutan – In the coming era of manned space exploration by the private sector, market forces will spur development and yield new, low-cost space technologies. If the history of private aviation is any guide, private development efforts will be safer, too.
Buzz Aldrin – Drive over to the nearest airport, and enroll in flight classes. You will experience the joy of freedom in the air above, as you study the mechanics of how this is made possible by understanding the construction, the laws of motion, the air that can provide lift when it is moved by propulsion through the air, and stay above the gravity pulling the airplane back down to earth.

Carl Sandburg – What of the Wright boys in Dayton? Just around the corner they had a shop and did a bicycle business-and they wanted to fly for the sake of flying. They were Man the Seeker, Man on a Quest. Money was their last thought, their final absent-minded idea. They threw out a lot of old mistaken measurements and figured new ones that stood up when they took off and held the air and steered a course. They proved that “the faster you go the less power you need.”
Carolina Herrera – When I was living in Los Angeles, I always booked a moisturizing milk-and-honey massage the day before flying to Spain. It was heaven – I never got dry plane skin or felt stiff from sitting in one position.
Casey Neistat – The reason why people wear pajamas to the airport in the first place is so that they’ll be comfortable during their flight. But you know, typically, air travel is 50 to 75 percent of the time you spend traveling. The rest of the time you spend in public places like airports and around other people. That’s when looking good trumps comfort.
Cassandra Clare – When one steals a flying balloon and animates it to fly over Paris, one should, ideally, have some idea how said balloon normally works.
Cecil Beaton – 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.
Cecil Day Lewis – We who fly do so for the love of flying. We are alive in the air with this miracle that lies in our hands and beneath our feet. The pleasure of just getting up off the ground, getting into the air, getting our machine working, listening to the engine. Whatever it might be, you are master of it. You can take it up, bring it down, roll it, loop it, and all yourself. It’s terrific egoism. You can’t get that feeling in anything else, that feeling of leaving the earth, of going to heaven and really lifting yourself up off this flat dish of earth into the three dimensions of God.
Cecil Day-Lewis – Flying alone! Nothing gives such a sense of mastery over time over mechanism, mastery indeed over space, time, and life itself, as this.
Cesar Pelli – The desire to reach for the sky runs deep in our human psyche.
Charles C. Mann – A world with a sudden limit on air travel would be tremendously different from the one we live in now.
Charles Duryea – Flying is within our grasp. We have naught to do but take it.
Charles F. Kettering – Nothing ever built arose to touch the skies unless some man dreamed that it should, some man believed that it could, and some man willed that it must.
Charles Kingsley – Did not learned men, too, hold, till within the last twenty-five years, that a flying dragon was an impossible monster? And do we not now know that there are hundreds of them found fossil up and down the world? People call them Pterodactyles: but that is only because they are ashamed to call them flying dragons, after denying so long that flying dragons could exist.
Charles Lindbergh – Flying has torn apart the relationship of space and time; it uses our old clock but with new yardsticks.
Charles Lindbergh – 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.
Charles 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 Lindbergh – 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 Lindbergh – I’m not bound to be in aviation at all. I’m here only because I love the sky and flying more than anything else on earth. Of course there’s danger; but a certain amount of danger is essential to the quality of life. I don’t believe in taking foolish chances’ but nothing can be accomplished without taking any chance at all.
Charles Lindbergh – 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 – Pilots are drawn to flying because it’s a perfect combination of science, romance and adventure.
Charles Lindbergh – 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.
Charles Lindbergh – Sometimes, flying feels too godlike to be attained by man. Sometimes, the world from above seems too beautiful, too wonderful, too distant for human eyes to see .
Charles Lindbergh – The life of an aviator seemed to me ideal. It involved skill. It brought adventure. It made use of the latest developments of science. Mechanical engineers were fettered to factories and drafting boards while pilots have the freedom of wind with the expanse of sky. There were times in an aeroplane when it seemed I had escaped mortality to look down on earth like a God.
Charles Lindbergh – These phantoms speak with human voices — friendly, vapor-like shapes, without substance, able to vanish or appear at will, to pass in and out through the walls of the fuselage as though no walls were there. At times, voices come out of the air itself, clear yet far away, traveling through distances that can’t be measured by the scale of human miles; familiar voices, conversing and advising on my flight, discussing problems of my navigation, reassuring me, giving me messages of importance unattainable in ordinary life.
Charles Lindbergh – 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.
Charles M. Schulz – Here I am flying high over enemy lines in my Sopwith Camel searching for the Red Baron. Who’s that behind me? It’s the Red Baron! He has me in his sights! Give my regards to Broadway.
Charles Rumney Samson – I think there is something exhilarating in flying amongst clouds, and always get a feeling of wanting to pit my aeroplane against them, charge at them, climb over them to show them you have them beat, circle round them, and generally play with them; but clouds can on occasion hold their own against the aviator, and many a pilot has found himself emerging from a cloud not on a level keel.
Charley Pride – Flying was as necessary to my business as fiddles and footlights.
Chesley Sullenberger – We have made flying so cheap, I’m afraid we are going to make it cheap at any cost.
Chetan Bhagat – When you fly high people will throw stones at you. Don’t look down. Just fly higher so the stones won’t reach you
Chris Carter – Learning to fly an airplane taught me a way of thinking, an approach to problem-solving that was applicable and effective. Pilots are very methodical and meticulous, and artists tend not to be.
Christian Morgenstern – Aviation will give new nourishment to the religious sprit of mankind. It will add airspace to those other great heighteners of the cosmic mood: the wood, the sea, the desert.
Christopher Logue – Come to the edge. We might fall. Come to the edge. It’s too high! COME TO THE EDGE! And they came And he pushed And they flew.
Christopher Moore – Turtles hate heights. They don’t even like being a few feet off the ground. It’s the main reason they have resisted evolution for so long-fear of heights. Turtle thinking goes thus: Sure, first our scales turn into feathers and the next thing you know we’re flying and chirping and perching on trees. We’ve seen it happen. Thanks, but we’re staying right here in the mud where we belong. You’re not going to see us flying full-tilt boogie into a sliding glass door.
Chuck Yeager – I was always afraid of dying. Always. It was my fear that made me learn everything I could about my airplane and my emergency equipment, and kept me flying respectful of my machine and always alert in the cockpit.
Chuck Yeager – If you can walk away from a landing, it’s a good landing. If you can use the aircraft the next day, it’s an outstanding landing.
Chuck Yeager – Leveling off at 42,000 feet, I had thirty percent of my fuel, so I turned on rocket chamber three and immediately reached .96 Mach. I noticed that the faster I got, the smoother the ride. Suddenly the Mach needle began to fluctuate. It went up to .965 Mach – then tipped right off the scale … We were flying supersonic. And it was a smooth as a baby’s bottom; Grandma could be sitting up there sipping lemonade.
Chuck Yeager – There is no such thing as a natural born pilot. Whatever my aptitudes or talents, becoming a proficient pilot was hard work, really a lifetime’s learning experience. For the best pilots, flying is an obsession, the one thing in life they must do continually. The best pilots fly more than the others; that’s why they’re the best. Experience is everything. The eagerness to learn how and why every piece of equipment works is everything. And luck is everything, too.
Clay Lacy – If the world’s decision makers did not have corporate aviation, we’d be ten years behind.
Corrie Ten Boom – If a bird is flying for pleasure, it flies with the wind, but if it meets danger it turns and faces the wind, in order that it may rise higher.
Cory Lidle – Really, anyone can learn how to fly. If you can drive a bus, you can fly an airplane.
Crystal Waters – To me, flying free is doing what I want to do, even if it’s different from what everybody expects me to do. I’m flying free when I win the battle between me and the people who thought I should go down this road and I find my own road.

Dale Jamieson – People who go around saying that it is wrong to fly and to eat meat are not so much making appeals to us from within our shared morality, but engaging in something more like “persuasive definition.” They want us to look at the world and ourselves in a different way. Someday these prohibitions against flying and eating meat may be written into our moral psychology, but it will only be after there are viable, widely shared alternatives that are beginning to be widely adopted.
Dalton Trumbo – Have you ever been up in your plane at night, alone, somewhere, 20,000 feet above the ocean?… Did you ever hear music up there?… It’s the music a man’s spirit sings to his heart, when the earth’s far away and there isn’t any more fear. It’s the high, fine, beautiful sound of an earth-bound creature who grew wings and flew up high and looked straight into the face of the future. And caught, just for an instant, the unbelievable vision of a free man in a free world.
Danica Patrick – If there’s one great thing I think that’s happened over the years, it’s that women are being accepted into a man’s world in all different areas, whether it’s flying an airplane or driving a race car.
Dave Barry – “Turbulence.” This is what pilots announce that you have encountered when your plane strikes an object in midair. You’ll be flying along, and there will be an enormous, shuddering WHUMP, and clearly the plane has rammed into an airborne object at least the size of a water buffalo, and the pilot will say, “Folks, we’re encountering a little turbulence.” Meanwhile they are up there in the cockpit trying desperately to clean water-buffalo organs off the windshield.
David Attenborough – Birds were flying from continent to continent long before we were. They reached the coldest place on Earth, Antarctica, long before we did. They can survive in the hottest of deserts. Some can remain on the wing for years at a time. They can girdle the globe. Now, we have taken over the earth and the sea and the sky, but with skill and care and knowledge, we can ensure that there is still a place on Earth for birds in all their beauty and variety – if we want to… And surely, we should.
David Attenborough – I think a major element of jetlag is psychological. Nobody ever tells me what time it is at home.
David Beaty – The air is the most mysterious, the most exciting, the most challenging of all the elements. We leave the planet, we leave the sea, we leave the earth. The air is no longer of this world.
David Letterman – When you think about flying, it’s nuts really. Here you are at about 40,000 feet, screaming along at 700 miles an hour and you’re sitting there drinking Diet Pepsi and eating peanuts. It just doesn’t make any sense.
David M. Brown – As a physician and as a pilot, I think it lets me be a pretty good translator having one foot in the medical world and one foot in the flying world. Sometimes when the medical guys come in and speak medical stuff to the pilots, the pilots really don’t know what they’re saying.
David M. Brown – I was interested in flying beginning at age 7, when a close family friend took me in his little airplane. And I remember looking at the wheel of the airplane as we rolled down the runway, because I wanted to remember the exact moment that I first went flying… the other thing growing up is that I was always interested in science.
David Neeleman – If it’s torture flying one airline and [yours] is a pleasant experience, it certainly helps your revenue.
David Neeleman – People don’t really look forward to flying that much. It’s like they want to get to the place, but they don’t look forward to the experience.
Dean Potter – Entranced by the flight of a raven, I watch its shadow move effortlessly against golden, shimmering granite. I long to be that free, flying above the cluttered world of normalcy, where so many are half alive.
Dean Potter – For some reason, BASE jumping is misunderstood and our government forbids it and makes it illegal in most every place in the country. So I’m kind of a criminal here in the United States for pursuing the dream of flight, but everywhere else I go, every other country, I’m kind of looked up to, or fascinated with for the flying that I do.
Dean Potter – I think everybody has a dream of flying at least once in their life. For me, it’s been over and over a recurring dream. It’s mostly that. That desire to be as free as the birds, to be unhindered. I started off as – and am still – a free solo climber. So being in the air is a huge fear of mine. So there’s a combination of going toward my fear as well as being fascinated with the air.
Dean Potter – It’s kind of strange to be a free soloist when you know so much about flying, because I’m playing two opposite games, or practicing two polar opposite arts. One is the art of not falling. The other one is flying. With both those things spinning in my mind, there’s a lot to process and it’s pretty mind-boggling.
Dean Potter – It’s one of the most fundamental desires of man, of being free and flying unhindered, and it really seems to go a lot with our founding fathers’ principles of freedom.
Dee Dee Myers – No reporter is flying around in borrowed twin-engine airplanes.
Dee Dee Ramone – I had a really intense flying dream most of my childhood into my teens. I would go out at night and fly all over the city and I could facilitate other people to fly with me.
Dejan Stojanovic – Fly without wings; Dream with open eyes; See in darkness.
Dennis Miller – My fear of flying starts as soon as I buckle myself in and then the guy up front mumbles a few unintelligible words then before I know it I’m thrust into the back of my seat by acceleration that seems way too fast and the rest of the trip is an endless nightmare of turbulence, of near misses. And then the cabbie drops me off at the airport.
Denzel Washington – The time to worry about flying is when you’re on the ground. When you’re up in the air, it’s too late. No point in worrying about it then.
Devon Windsor – I like to bring some hydrating face oils and de-puffing eye patches in case I get puffy on the flight. I also always am sure to travel with my own silk eye mask; it’s so necessary when trying to sleep on flights.
Diane Ackerman – Flying has changed how we imagine our planet, which we have seen whole from space, so that even the farthest nations are ecological neighbors. It has changed our ideas about time. When you can gird the earth at 1,000 m.p.h., how can you endure the tardiness of a plumber? Most of all, flying has changed our sense of our body, the personal space in which we live, now elastic and swift. I could be in Bombay for afternoon tea if I wished. My body isn’t limited by its own weaknesses; it can rush through space.
Dick Clark – Jet lag is for amateurs.
Donald A. Wollheim – I think that space flight is a condition of Nature that comes into effect when an intelligent species reaches the saturation point of its planetary habitat combined with a certain level of technological ability… I think it is a built-in gene-directed drive for the spreading of the species and its continuation.
Douglas Adams – “The Guide says there is an art to flying”, said Ford, “or rather a knack. The knack lies in learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss.”
Douglas Adams – He spent a lot of time flying. He learnt to communicate with birds and discovered that their conversation was fantastically boring. It was all to do with wind speed, wing spans, power-to-weight ratios and a fair bit about berries. Unfortunately, he discovered, once you have learnt birdspeak you quickly come to realize that the air is full of it the whole time, just inane bird chatter. There is no getting away from it.
Douglas Adams – The kakapo is an extremely fat bird. A good-sized adult will weigh about six or seven pounds, and its wings are just about good for waggling a bit if it thinks it’s about to trip over something – but flying is out of the question. Sadly, however, it seems that not only has the kakapo forgotten how to fly, but it has forgotten that it has forgotten how to fly. Apparently a seriously worried kakapo will sometimes run up a tree and jump out of it, whereupon it flies like a brick and lands in a graceless heap on the ground.
Douglas Bader – We were all flying around up and down the coast near Dunkirk looking for enemy aircraft which seemed also to be milling around with no particular cohesion.
Douglas Coupland – Flying dreams mean that you’re doing the right thing with your life.
Douglas Coupland – Hasn’t it been a long time since you had a flying dream?
Douglas Coupland – Just then a bee bumbled above us and stole our attention the way flying things can.
Dov Davidoff – Flying first class means sitting next to a better class of person I don’t want to talk to.
Dov Davidoff – Space and time are figments of you’re imagination, unless the guy you’re flying next to won’t shut up.
Dr. Seuss – You’ll be on your way up! You’ll be seeing great sights! You’ll join the high fliers who soar to high heights.
Duane G. Carey – And then, when I thought about joining the Air Force, flying seemed like a natural extension of the motorcycling experience. You’re going faster, higher. You’re operating a machine that’s a lot more powerful than you are.

E.B. Jeppesen – I didn’t start out to chart the skies; it’s just no one had done it before.
Eddie Rickenbacker – The very existence of aviation is proof that man, given the will, has the capacity to accomplish deeds that seem impossible.
Eileen Collins – Some people said, “we don’t want to risk astronauts lives anymore, we need to stop doing this”. The astronauts don’t feel that way. We fly for our country, we fly for humanity, we fly for exploration, we fly for a variety of reasons, and we don’t stop flying because we have accidents.
Elayne Boosler – I never minded flying cheap. I always said to myself, ‘Taking this flight saves enough money to rescue four dogs, or six cats, or will let me make a difference to the one woman saving chimps in Cameroon.’
Elder Paisios of Mount Athos – Thoughts are like airplanes flying in the air. If you ignore them, there is no problem. If you pay attention to them, you create an airport inside your head and permit them to land!
Elizabeth Wein – He just put his hand through the bulkhead, exactly as she’d done, and squeezed my shoulder. He has very strong fingers. And he kept his hand there the whole way home, even when he was reading the map and giving me headings. So I am not flying alone now after all.
Ellen DeGeneres – I know that experts say you’re more likely to get hurt crossing the street than you are flying, but that doesn’t make me any less frightened of flying. If anything, it makes me more afraid of crossing the street.
Ellen McLaughlin – The sensation of flying is incredible, and its such a miraculous notion to go into the air and see the world without delineation.
Elon Musk – If you go back back a few hundred years, what we take for granted today would seem like magic – being able to talk to people over long distances, to transmit images, flying, accessing vast amounts of data like an oracle. These are all things that would have been considered magic a few hundred years ago.
Elton John – Sometimes when I’m flying over the Alps I think, ‘that’s like all the cocaine I sniffed.’
Erich Fromm – Technical Utopias-flying, for example-have been achieved by the new science of nature. The human utopia…a united new humankind living in solidarity and peace, free from economic determination and from war and class struggle-can be achieved, provided we spend the same energy, intelligence, and enthusiasm on the realization of the human Utopia as we have spent on the realization of our technical Utopias.
Erich Hartmann – In combat flying, fancy precision aerobatic work is really not of much use. Instead, it is the rough maneuver which succeeds.
Erich Hartmann – Once committed to an attack, fly in at full speed. After scoring crippling or disabling hits, I would clear myself and then repeat the process. I never pursued the enemy once they had eluded me. Better to break off and set up again for a new assault. I always began my attacks from full strength, if possible, my ideal flying height being 22,000 ft because at that altitude I could best utilize the performance of my aircraft. Combat flying is based on the slashing attack and rough maneuvering.
Ernest K. Gann – Flying is hypnotic and all pilots are 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.
Ernest K. Gann – 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.
Eva Herzigova – We’re constantly buying airplane tickets; we travel on the Concorde.
Evan Ross – My mom liked to have us travel in first class with her. She’s like, ‘I work for my money, and I want my kids to live a certain kind of way.’ My dad used to get so mad at my mom for flying us first class. So it was a clash on that.
Eydie Gorme – Everything has changed. The flying changed. The airports have changed.

Felix Baumgartner – Sometimes you have to go up really high to see how small you are
Ferdinand Ferber – To invent an airplane is nothing. To build one is something. To fly is everything.
Fernando Alonso – Totally uneventful. It was a very successful first flight. To be honest, it was a little bit boring.
Florence Nightingale – When shall we see a life full of steady enthusiasm, walking straight to its aim, flying home, as that bird is now, against the wind – with the calmness and the confidence of one who knows the laws of God and can apply them?
Francis Bacon – Be not penny-wise. Riches have wings. Sometimes they fly away of themselves, and sometimes they must be set flying to bring in more.
Francis Gary Powers – I was a pilot flying an airplane and it just so happened that, where I was flying, made what I was doing spying.
Francisco Lopez – It’s OK to have butterflies. Just get them flying in formation.
Frank Carson – I just want to apologise for being late. I was flying back from Spain and the air hostess said: “We are two hours late Mr Carson.” When I asked why, she said: “The pilot has heard a funny noise in the engine that he doesn’t like, so we are waiting on another pilot who can’t hear it.”
Frank Miller – I suppose you’ll take up flying next, like that fellow in Metropolis.
Frank Wead – Whenever the weather licks the pilot instead of him lickin’ the weather, he’s finished. The first time makes the second time easier. And the first thing he knows, he’s in trouble when the weather is perfect.
Frank Wead – You know what I’m talking about. This business has changed. Flyers aren’t pilots anymore, they’re engineers. This is a college man’s game. Our work is done. The pioneering is over.
Franka Potente – I used to be very afraid of flying. It would creep me out and make me very tense and very uncomfortable, and I would sweat or even cry. I was very, very scared of dying, but I’m not anymore. Fears need to be indulged, in order to exist. I don’t have much time to indulge in any fears.
Franklin D. Roosevelt – Aviation is a science that cannot be limited to men only.
Frederick Forsythe – The last of the lonely places is the sky, a trackless void where nothing lives or grows, and above it, space itself. Man may have been destined to walk upon ice or sand, or climb the mountains or take craft upon the sea. But surely he was never meant to fly? But he does, and finding out how to do it was his last great adventure.
Freeman Dyson – Successful technologies often begin as hobbies. Jacques Cousteau invented scuba diving because he enjoyed exploring caves. The Wright brothers invented flying as a relief from the monotony of their normal business of selling and repairing bicycles.
Friedrich Nietzsche – Forgetting: that is a divine capacity. And whoever aspires to the heights and wants to fly must cast off much that is heavy and make himself light–I call it a divine capacity for lightness.
Friedrich Nietzsche – 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 – How do you expect to learn to dance when you have not even learned to walk! And above the dancer is still the flyer and his bliss.
Friedrich Nietzsche – I fly in dreams, I know it is my privilege, I do not recall a single situation in dreams when I was unable to fly. To execute every sort of curve and angle with a light impulse, a flying mathematics – that is so distinct a happiness that it has permanently suffused my basic sense of happiness.
Friedrich Nietzsche – It is no doubt possible to fly–but first you must know how to dance like an angel.
Friedrich Nietzsche – Man alone resists the direction of gravitation: he constantly wants to fall–upwards.
Friedrich Nietzsche – The higher we soar, the smaller we appear to those who cannot fly.
Friedrich Nietzsche – What a dissimilarity we see in walking, swimming, and flying. And yet it is one and the same motion: it is just that the load- bearing capacity of the earth differs from that of the water, and that that of the water differs from that of the air! Thus we should also learn to fly as thinkers–and not imagine that we are thereby becoming idle dreamers!
Friedrich Oblessor – The fascination of flight can’t be expressed with words. But it really lies beyond the capabilities of human endeavor. Once you’ve experienced it, you’ll never be able to forget it.

Galway Kinnell – Prose is walking; poetry is flying.
Gavin Lyall – “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?”
Gene Cernan – I was a child of World War Two. I saw films of pilots taking off from aircraft carriers and decided that was the only thing I wanted to do. And it had to be flying from sea carriers. Airfields were not enough.
Gene Cernan – Prepare for the unknown, unexpected and inconceivable … after 50 years of flying I’m still learning every time I fly.
Gene Simmons – I fly economy. I do often fly first class, but I don’t travel with a posse, or bodyguard, or an assistant.
Geoff Dyer – Birds in flight, claims the architect Vincenzo Volentieri, are not between places, they carry their places with them. We never wonder where they live: they are at home in the sky, in flight. Flight is their way of being in the world.
George Carlin – What does it mean to pre-board? Do you get on before you get on?
George Cayley – I am well convinced that Aerial Navigation will form a most prominent feature in the progress of civilisation.
George Hamilton – I had a good time doing it, and I hope that Treat and I plan to go flying in his private jet!
George Melville – There probably can be found no better example of the speculative tendency carrying man to the erge of the chimerical than in his attempts to imitate the birds, or no field where so much inventive seed has been sown with so little return as in the attempts of man to fly successfully through the air.
Georges Besançon – Aeronautics confers beauty and grandeur, combining art and science for those who devote themselves to it … The aeronaut, free in space, sailing in the infinite, loses himself in the immense undulations of nature. He climbs, he rises, he soars, he reigns, he hurtles the proud vault of the azure sky.
Gerard Arpey – At American Airlines, we have built a business around the love of travel that has lasted three quarters of a century. And I’m pretty sure we’re just getting started.
Gerard Arpey – But I don’t think the popularity of flying has diminished a bit.
Gerard Butler – Whenever I watched this movie [“How to Train Your Dragon”], I thought, “That’s where I want to be. I want to be up in that sky. I want to be flying through the clouds and be living in that environment.” So I think if I had a dragon, I would spend most of my time up in the air all over the place and taking in this beautiful planet.
Gilbert K. Chesterton – Angels can fly because they take themselves lightly.
Gilbert K. Chesterton – There is no logical connection between flying and laying eggs.
Glenn Curtiss – It is hard enough for anyone to map out a course of action and stick to it, particularly in the face of the desires of one’s friends; but it is doubly hard for an aviator to stay on the ground waiting for just the right moment to go into the air.
Gloria Steinem – I’m clearly not frightened of flying because I fly all the time, but every once in a while I do, as we all do, think, What if this plane goes down? And I think, Well, if I’m holding the hand of the person sitting next to me, then I’m holding everyone’s hand.
Golda Meir – My dear, old age is like an airplane flying in a storm. Once you’re in it there’s nothing you can do. You can’t stop a plane, you can’t stop a storm, you can’t stop time. So you might as well take it easy, with wisdom.
Gordon Baxter – Instrument flying is an unnatural act probably punishable by God.
Gordon Baxter – When asked by someone how much money flying takes: Why, all of it!
Gordon Cooper – 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.
Gordon Cooper – I have the normal desire, experienced by everybody who’s ever flown an airplane with a certain amount of zoom capability, to go a little bit higher and a little bit faster.
Gordon Cooper – I live for that exhilarating moment when I’m in an airplane rushing down the runway and pull on the stick and feel lift under its wings. It’s a magical feeling to climb toward the heavens, seeing objects and people on the ground grow smaller and more insignificant. You have left that world beneath you. You are inside the sky.
Graham Brown – I wanted to be a pilot. I loved flying and I loved all the technology and the equipment and the sense of adventure that came with it. I think that feeling still bleeds over into everything I do today.
Graham Hawkes – Everyone loves to fly and flying underwater is even better than flying in air because there are things around you.
Grant Cardone – You can’t get anywhere flying under the radar.
Grover C. Norwood – I laugh more than other men, I look up and see more than they, I know how the clouds feel, What it’s like to have the blue in my lap, to look down on birds, to feel freedom in a thing called the stick. Who but I can slice between God’s billowed legs, and feel then laugh and crash with His step. Who else has seen the unclimbed peaks? The rainbow’s secret? The real reason birds sing? Because I Fly, I envy no man on earth.
Guy Murchie – Sometimes I feel a strange exhilaration up here which seems to come from something beyond the mere stimulus of flying. It is a feeling of belonging to the sky, of owning and being owned – if only for a moment – by the air I breathe. It is akin to the well known claim of the swallow: each bird staking out his personal bug-strewn slice of heaven, his inviolate property of the blue.
Gwynne Shotwell – What would air travel look like if airplanes were thrown out after each flight? No one would be flying in airplanes.

Harriet Quimby – I was annoyed from the start by the attitude of doubt by the spectators that I would never really make the flight. This attitude made me more determined than ever to succeed.
Harriet Quimby – If a woman wants to fly, first of all she must, of course, abandon skirts and don a knickerbocker uniform.
Harrison Ford – I fly myself everywhere. I like all kinds of flying, including practical flying for search and rescue. And I also like to fly into the backcountry, usually the Frank Church Wilderness in Idaho. I go with a group of friends, and we set up camp for about five days and explore little dirt strips and canyons.
Harrison Ford – The focus and the concentration and the attention to detail that flying takes is a kind of meditation. I find it restful and engaging, and other things slip away.
Harry Harper – Again I felt that overpowering rush of excitement which I found 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.
Harun Yahya – I always wonder why birds choose to stay in the same place when they can fly anywhere on the earth, then I ask myself the same question.
Heather Mitts – Whether I’m flying two hours or across the country, I always make sure to have a packet of almonds with me, an apple, and a Luna bar. I carry those around on a daily basis in case I’m stuck somewhere or hungry.
Hedy Lamarr – I’ve met the most interesting people while flying or on a boat. These methods of travel seem to attract the kind of people I want to be with.
Helen Keller – It’s wonderful to climb the liquid mountains of the sky. Behind me and before me is God and I have no fears.
Henri Mignet – To fly! to live as airmen live! Like them to ride the skyways from horizon to horizon, across rivers and forests! To free oneself from the petty disputes of everyday life, to be active, to feel the blood renewed in one’s vein — ah! that is life … Life in finer and simpler. My will is freer. I appreciate everything more, sunlight and shade, work and my friends. The sky is vast. I breathe deep gulps of the fine clear air of the heights. I feel myself to have achieved a higher state of physical strength and a clearer brain. I am living in the third dimension!
Henrik Ibsen – Has the progress of the human race taken a wrong direction? Why do we belong to the dry land? Why not to the air or the sea? The desire to possess wings; the strange dreams in which we imagine that we can fly and are flying without wondering about it. — What do these things mean?
Henry David Thoreau – Thank God men cannot fly, and lay waste the sky as well as the earth.
Henry Morton Stanley – The sky lovingly smiles on the earth and her children.
Henry Rollins – When I read that Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 had disappeared – a state-of-the-art Boeing 777, said to be an incredibly safe way to travel – I waited patiently for the chance to learn what happened.
Hermann E. Ott – Our resources will diminish in the coming decades at a time when hunger for energy grows dramatically… Eventually, it will just be impossible to fly – normal flights will become as expensive as flying with the Concorde.
Hermann Hesse – If a night-moth were to concentrate its will on flying to a star or some equally unattainable object, it wouldn’t succeed. Only, it wouldn’t even try in the first place. A moth confines its search to what has sense and value for it, what it needs, what is indispensable to its life… if I imagined that I wanted under all circumstances to get to the North Pole, then to achieve it I would have to desire it strongly enough that my whole being was ruled by it. But if I were to decide to will that the pastor should stop wearing his glasses, it would be useless. That would be making a game of it.
Hilda Lewis – I think hawking is the nearest thing to flying in this world. There you sit high up and poised light as air, the horse swift beneath you. You unhood your bird, let the jesses go and watch your falcon, its bells a-jingle, like some wild spirit take the air… and your own spirit goes with it.
Horatio Barber – Keep the aeroplane in such an attitude that the air pressure is always directly in the pilot’s face.
Howard Hughes – I want to be remembered for only one thing: my contribution to aviation.
Howard Rheingold – Dinosaurs grew feathers for heat regulation, but the ones that started flying started becoming birds.
Hugh Laurie – Driving a motorcycle is like flying. All your senses are alive. Being House is like flying, too. He’s free of the gravity of what people think.
Hugh Shelton – I feel very confident that Americans flying in the air are safe, and that only under the most dire of circumstances would our pilots even request permission to do that.
Hunter Hayes – I love flying planes.

Igor Sikorsky – Aeronautics was neither an industry nor even a science; both were yet to come. It was an art and I might say a passion. Indeed, at that time it was a miracle. It meant the realization of legends and dreams that had existed for thousands of years and had been pronounced again and again as impossible by scientific authorities. Therefore, even the brief and unsteady flights of that period were deeply impressive. Many times I observed expressions of joy and tears in the eyes of witnesses who for the first time watched a flying machine carrying a man in the air.
Igor Stravinsky – We can neither put back the clock nor slow down our forward speed, and as we are already flying pilotless, on instrument controls, it is even too late to ask where we are going.
Isak Dinesen – It is not the visions but the activity which makes you happy, and the joy and glory of the flier is the flight itself… Every time I have gone up in an aeroplane and looked down have realized I was free of the ground, I have had the consciousness of a new discovery. ‘I see:’ I have thought, ‘This was the idea. And now I understand everything.’

J. K. Aggrey – Thou art an eagle, thou doest belong to the sky and not to the earth, stretch forth thy wings and fly!
J. K. Rowling – “I had a dream about a motorcycle,” said Harry, remembering suddenly. “It was flying.” Uncle Vernon nearly crashed into the car in front. He turned right around in his seat and yelled at Harry, his face like a gigantic beet with a mustache: “MOTORCYCLES DON’T FLY!” Dudley and Piers sniggered. “I know they don’t,” said Harry. “It was only a dream.”
J. K. Rowling – Don’t be stupid, it’s a flying house!
J. M. Barrie – Second to the right, and straight on till morning.’ That, Peter had told Wendy, was the way to the Neverland; but even birds, carrying maps and consulting them at windy corners, could not have sighted it with these instructions.
J. M. Barrie – The moment you doubt whether you can fly, you cease for ever to be able to do it. The reason birds can fly and we can’t is simply that they have perfect faith, for to have faith is to have wings.
J. M. Barrie – Wendy, Wendy, when you are sleeping in your silly bed you might be flying about with me saying funny things to the stars.
Jack London – He was mastered by the sheer surging of life, the tidal wave of being, the perfect joy of each separate muscle, joint, and sinew in that it was everything that was not death, that it was aglow and rampant, expressing itself in movement, flying exultantly under the stars.
Jacqueline Cochran – I have found adventure in flying, in world travel, in business, and even close at hand… Adventure is a state of mind and spirit.
Jacqueline Cochran – I wanted to go higher than Rockefeller Center, which was being erected across the street from Saks Fifth Avenue and was going to cut off my view of the sky. . . . Flying got into my soul instantly but the answer as to why must be found somewhere back in the mystic maze of my birth and childhood and the circumstances of my earlier life. Whatever I am is elemental and the beginnings of it all have their roots in Sawdust Road. I might have been born in a hovel, but I determined to travel with the wind and stars.
Jacques Alexandre Cesare Charles – Nothing will ever equal that moment of joyous excitement which filled my whole being when I felt myself flying away from the earth. It was not mere pleasure; it was perfect bliss. Escaped from the frightful torments of persecution and of calumny, I felt that I was answering all in rising above all. To this sentiment succeeded one more lively still — the admiration of the majestic spectacle that spread itself out before us. On whatever side we looked, all was glorious; a cloudless sky above, a most delicious view around. ‘Oh, my friend,’ said I to M. Robert, ‘how great is our good fortune! I care not what may be the condition of the earth; it is the sky that is for me now.’
Jacques Charles – All was glorious – a cloudless sky above, a most delicious view around. . . . How great is our good fortune! I care not what may be the condition of the earth; it is the sky that is for me now.
Jacques Charles – Nothing will ever equal that moment of joyous excitement which filled my whole being when I felt myself flying away from the earth. It was not mere pleasure; it was perfect bliss. Escaped from the frightful torments of persecution and of calumny, I felt that I was answering all in rising above all.
Jacques Cousteau – I swam across the rocks and compared myself favorably with the sars. To swim fishlike, horizontally, was the logical method in a medium eight hundred times denser than air. To halt and hang attached to nothing, no lines or air pipe to the surface, was a dream. At night I had often had visions of flying by extending my arms as wings. Now I flew without wings. (Since that first aqualung flight, I have never had a dream of flying.)
James Dickey – Flight is the only truly new sensation than men have achieved in modern history.
James May – If it were possible – and I hope it will be some day – I’d like some sort of anti-gravity travel capsule: some way to travel around without the need for jets and wings and so on.
James Patterson – “Okay, so, flying,” I started, taking a deep breath and focusing on the thing I loved most in the world. “Flying is … great. It feels great when you’re doing it. It’s fun. Pure freedom. There’s nothing better.”
James Patterson – Do you want to know the closest thing to feeling the most powerful you can feel? Flying alone at night. Risky. Nothing but you and the wind soaring way above everything , slicing through the air like a Sword. Up and up until you feel like you can grab a star and hold it to your chest like a burning, Spiky thing.
James Sheridan Knowles – What delight To back the flying steed, that challenges The wind for speed! – seems native more of air Than earth! – whose burden only lends him fire! – Whose soul, in his task, turns labour into sport; Who makes your pastime his! I sit him now! He takes away my breath! He makes me reel! I touch not earth – I see not – hear not. All Is ecstasy of motion!
James Thurber – Man is flying too fast for a world that is round. Soon he will catch up with himself in a great rear end collision.
Jane Alison – I grew up flying over oceans and moving and sailing.
Janelle Monae – I take goldenseal, Echinacea and cod liver oil when flying to boost my immune system.
Janet Napolitano – Each and every one of the security measures we implement serves an important goal: providing safe and efficient air travel for the millions of people who rely on our aviation system every day.
Jay Kay – I love being able to go on local flights when the weather is right. I’ve popped to the Isle of Wight, Cornwall and been mountain flying in Wales. When I got my licence I was over the moon, it was one of the greatest days of my life – it took two years to get!
Jay R. Ferguson – Even though I’m a family guy, there is something that feels really beautiful about eliminating all children from flying. So, children have to fly on child-only planes. And the pilots have to be children as well.
Jean Batten – Every flyer who ventures across oceans to distant lands is a potential explorer; in his or her breast burns the same fire that urged adventurers of old to set forth in their sailing-ships for foreign lands.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau – At first we will only skim the surface of the earth like young starlings, but soon, emboldened by practice and experience, we will spring into the air with the impetuousness of the eagle, diverting ourselves by watching the childish behavior of the little men or awling miserably around on the earth below us.
Jeffrey Osborne – Only the two of us together flying high upon the wings of love.
Jerome Tharaud – 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.
Jerrie Cobb – I have this feeling that life is a spiritual adventure, and I want to make mine in the sky.
Jerry Crawford – To most people, the sky is the limit. To those who love aviation, the sky is home.
Jessie Redmon Fauset – Aviation is poetry … It’s the finest kind of moving around, you know, just as poetry is the finest way of using words.
Joe Bastianich – I was brought up to believe I could achieve anything. My mother instilled in me the belief that there was always something great coming. For example, even though I’m afraid of flying, I always think the plane can’t crash because there are so many better things still to come.
Johannes Kepler – As soon as somebody demonstrates the art of flying, settlers from our species of man will not be lacking on the moon and Jupiter… Given ships or sails adapted to the breezes of heaven, there will be those who will not shrink from even that vast expanse.
John B. S. Haldane – There is no great invention, from fire to flying, which has not been hailed as an insult to some god.
John Gillespie MaGee Jr. – Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of Earth And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings; Sunward I’ve climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth of sun-split clouds, — and done a hundred things You have not dreamed of — wheeled and soared and swung High in the sunlit silence. Hov’ring there, I’ve chased the shouting wind along, and flung My eager craft through footless halls of air…. Up, up the long, delirious, burning blue I’ve topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace. Where never lark, or even eagle flew — And, while with silent, lifting mind I’ve trod The high untrespassed sanctity of space, – Put out my hand, and touched the face of God.
John Glenn – I was sold on flying as soon as I had a taste for it.
John Green – Observation: It would be awesome to fly in a superfast airplane that could chase the sunrise around the world for a while.
John King – Learning to fly is one of humankind’s most inspiring achievements. When you learn to fly it changes who you are and how you think of yourself forever.
John L. Phillips – My dad served in two wars has been flying airplanes for 60 years now. He was certainly quite an inspiration.
John Niven – My family went to Toronto to visit relatives when I was 13 or 14. It was the first time we had ever been abroad. This was the early Eighties, and I remember the impossible glamour of air travel – my mum spending days trying to decide what she was going to wear on the plane.
John Ruskin – It is a strange thing how little in general people know about the sky. It is the part of all creation in which nature has done more for the sake of pleasing man, more, for the sole and evident purpose of talking to him and teaching him, than in any other of her works, and it is just the part in which we least attend to her. There are not many of her other works in which some more material or essential purpose than the mere pleasing of man is not answered by every part of their organization; but every essential purpose of the sky might, as far as we know, be answered, if once in three days, or thereabouts, a great, ugly black rain cloud were brought up over the blue, and everything well watered, and so all left blue again till next time, with perhaps a film of morning and evening mist for dew. And instead of this, there is not a moment of any day of our lives, when nature is not producing scene after scene, picture after picture, glory after glory, and working still upon such exquisite and constant principles of the most perfect beauty, that it is quite certain it is all done for us, and intended for our perpetual pleasure. And every man, wherever placed, however far from other sources of interest or of beauty, has this doing for him constantly … the sky is for all; bright as it is, it is not ‘too bright, nor good, for human nature’s daily food,’ it is fitted in all its functions for the perpetual comfort and exalting of the heart, for the soothing it and purifying it from its dross and dust. Sometimes gentle, sometimes capricious, sometimes awful, never the same for two moments together; almost human in its passions, almost spiritual in its tenderness, almost divine in its infinity.
John Travolta – As you get older, you have to force yourself to have new dreams. For instance, I’ve been flying for 37 years, but now teaching others to fly is interesting for me. Sometimes you have to find new angles on life to keep you interested, like sharing successes and inspiring and helping others.
John Travolta – I think aerobatic flying is athletic. I don’t do aerobatic flying, but I would put that in a category of a sport. I would put regular flying in the category of an art or machine-type thing.
John W. MacGillivray – Lord of the thunderhead and sky You placed in us the will to fly, You taught our hand speed, skill and grace To soar beyond our dwelling place. You shared with us the eagle’s view, The right to soar as eagle’s do, The right to call the clouds our home, And grateful, through your heavens roam. May we assembled here tonight, And all who love the thrill of flight, Recall with twofold gratitude, Your gift of wings, your gift of food.
Jonathan Swift – The bulk of mankind is as well equipped for flying as thinking.
Jonathan Winters – Something I’ll always remember – when I was a kid, I shook hands with Orville Wright. Forty years later, I shook hands with Neil Armstrong. The guy that invented the airplane and the guy that walked on the moon. In a lifetime, that’s kinda wild when you think about it.
Jose Maria Velasco Ibarra – Pilots are a rare kind of human. They leave the ordinary surface of the world, to purify their soul in the sky, and they come down to earth, only after receiving the communion of the infinite.
Joseph Addison – Flying would give such occasions for intrigues as people cannot meet with who have nothing but legs to carry them.
Joseph Force Crater – I used my aviation contacts to open a travel agency. I used to book Caribbean flights.
Josh Gates – In flight…entire days can be wound back or skipped over…as we exist merely in a world of vapor. Adventures are both beginning and coming to a close up here as people from opposite ends of experience paradoxically move in one direction.
Josh Gates – The magnificent thing about her [Amelia Earhart] is, in the eyes of the world, she simply never died. Her fear never witnessed, her failure never recorded, her shiny twin-engine Electra never recovered. Earhart’s legacy of inspiration is amplified because her adventure is perpetual. We don’t think of her as dead; we think of her as missing. She is forever flying, somewhere beyond Lae, over that limitless blue horizon.
Joss Whedon – Ain’t all buttons and charts, little albatross. Know what the first rule of flying is? Well I s’pose you do, since you already know what I’m ’bout to say. I do. But I like to hear you say it. Love. Can know all the math in the ‘verse but take a boat in the air that you don’t love? She’ll shake you off just as sure as a turn in the worlds. Love keeps her in the air when she oughta fall down…tell you she’s hurtin’ ‘fore she keens…makes her a home.
Joyce Carol Oates – Flying fosters fantasies of childhood, of omnipotence, rapid shifts of being, miraculous moments; it stirs our capacity for dreaming.
Juan Trippe – Mass travel by air may prove to be more significant to world destiny than the atom bomb. For there can be no atom bomb potentially more powerful than the air tourist, charged with curiosity, enthusiasm, and good will, who can roam the four corners of the world, meeting in friendship and understanding the people of other nations and race.
Judith M Bardwick – With air travel there is no distance, there is only time.
Judith Rascoe – You see, in a world where elephants are pursued by flying men, people are just naturally going to want to get high.

Kami Garcia – Flying or falling, it’s up to us.
Kami Garcia – I’m not falling anymore. That’s what L says, and she’s right. I guess you could say I’m flying. We both are. And I’m pretty sure somewhere up there in the real blue sky and carpenter bee greatness, Amma’s flying, too. We all are, depending on how you look at it. Flying or falling, it’s up to us. Because the sky isn’t really made of blue paint, and there aren’t just two kinds of people in this world, the stupid and the stuck. We only think there are. Don’t waste your time with either-with anything. It’s not worth it.
Kanye West – What I feel like – ’cause I wanna be married, of course – I feel like the type of girl I would be with is a fellow superhero. So we get that ‘already flying and now we’re just flying together’ thing.
Karan Bajaj – In the yoga sutras, they have this beautiful analogy that the journey of life is like the flight of an eagle, or the journey over multiple lifetimes is like a flight of an eagle. First, the eagle stretches its wings high, high, high, and experiences everything that the world has to offer in terms of flight. It’s growing and flying and it’s experiencing, and then it brings its wings down gracefully and that is the completion of the journey.
Karan Bajaj – There are people like me who are not there yet, who are still the eagle flying high right now, still experiencing more in the world and growing as a result of that – and that is my journey.
Kate Mara – Whenever I dream about flying, it’s the best feeling in the world.
Kathryn Lasky – What is a fleecy as a cloud, As majestic and shimmering as the breaking dawn, As gorgeous as the sun the sun is strong? Why, it’s ME! Twilight, the Great Gray, Tiger of the sky — Light of the Night, Most beautiful, An avian delight. I beam — I gleam — I’m a livin’ flying dream. Watch me roll off this cloud and pop on back. This is flying. I ain’t no hack.
Keith Emerson – You’ve got to keep things flying.
Keith Henson – If anyone wonders why the airlines are not doing well it is because flying has been made such an unpleasant and degrading experience.
Keith Morris – I’m flying everywhere in my private jet.
Ken Blanchard – At Southwest, they’re on a mission to democratize air travel. When they first started, the only people who could fly were relatively wealthy businesspeople, and Herb Kelleher’s vision was to offer everyone the chance to visit a friend or relative during a happy and a sad time. That’s a vision employees can get excited about.
Kenneth Oppel – “Honestly,” she sighed, “I don’t know what kind of life we’ll have together, with me always flying off in one direction and you in the other.” I smiled. “It’s a good thing the world’s round,” I said.
Kent McCord – I longed to fly. I was paid in flying lessons and, by the time I was 13, I’d logged 100 hours at the controls.
Kesha – I try to get in quiet time and book time, but really, the only time I ever get that is when I’m on an airplane – I have a fear of flying, but I actually love flying because it’s the only time I can sleep, and it’s the only time I get to read.
Khaled Hosseini – Flying kite with my friends is one of the seminal memories of growing up for me.
Kiefer Sutherland – I’ve always been shocked that people that I’m actually flying with say, ‘Oh, I feel safer on the plane with you.’ I’m thinking, ‘You must not watch the show because everybody around me gets killed.’
Kiki Smith – I love flying buttresses!
Kim Coles – I’m happy to get up in the morning. I’ll tell you a little secret: I still want to work in Hollywood. However, I get really excited about getting on a plane, flying to a city, and talking to a group of people about finding the gifts they already have inside.
Konstantin Tsiolkovsky – The blue distance, the mysterious Heavens, the example of birds and insects flying everywhere — are always beckoning Humanity to rise into the air.
Kylie Bax – My greatest fear is flying. And I do a lot of flying, so that’s a bummer.
Kyo Maclear – If I were flying, I would travel to a perfect place. A place with frosted cakes and beautiful flowers and excellent trees to climb and absolutely no doldrums.

L. Welch Pogue – 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.
Lane Wallace – Don’t let the fear of falling keep you from knowing the joy of flight.
Larry Mize – My butterflies are still going strong. I just hope they are flying in formation.
Len Morgan – The way I see it, you can either work for a living or you can fly airplanes. Me, I’d rather fly.
Leonardo da Vinci – 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.
Leonardo DaVinci – A bird is an instrument working according to mathematical law, which instrument it is within the capacity of man to reproduce with all its movements.
Leonardo DaVinci – 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.
Leroy Chiao – I loved flying as much as I thought I would and continue to fly aircraft.
Lewis Black – You want to know what it’s like to be on a plane for 22 hours? Sit in a chair, squeeze your head as hard as you can, don’t stop, then take a paper bag and put it over your mouth and nose and breath your own air over and over and over.
Libba Bray – As one, they leap, laughing, and that is where we leave them – mouths open, arms spread wide, fingers splayed to take in the whole world, bodies flying high in defiance of gravity, as if they will never fall.
Link Wray – You know, I’m an eagle, flying around in the mountains.
Lisa Snowdon – On long haul flights I always drink loads and loads of water and eat light and healthy food.
Loretta Swit – I felt like I was flying without a net. But once I realized that the audience was my partner, I was flying a jet, because the people would allow me to develop the character on stage.
Louis Bleriot – I headed for this white mountain, but was caught in the wind and the mist . . . I followed the cliff from north to south, but the wind, against which I was fighting, got even stronger. A break in the coast appeared to my right, just before Dover Castle. I was madly happy. I headed for it. I rushed for it. I was above ground!
Louis Bleriot – The most beautiful dream that has haunted the heart of man since Icarus is today reality.
Louis C.K. – People come back from flights and tell you a story like it’s a horror story. That’s how bad they make it sound. They’re like, ‘It was the worst day of my life. We didn’t board for 20 minutes and they made us sit there on the runway for 40 minutes.’ Oh really? What happened next? Did you fly in the air, incredibly, like a bird? Did you partake in the miracle of human flight you non-contributing zero?’
Louis C.K. – People say there’s delays on flights. Delays, really? New York to California in five hours, that used to take 30 years, a bunch of people used to die on the way there, have a baby, you would end up with a whole different group of people by the time you got there. Now you watch a movie and [go to the toilet] and you’re home.
Louis C.K. – You’re flying! It’s amazing! Everybody on every plane should just constantly be going: ‘Oh my God! Wow! You’re flying! You’re sitting in a chair, in the sky!’
Louisa May Alcott – You are the gull, Jo, strong and wild, fond of the storm and the wind, flying far out to sea, and happy all alone.
Luciano De Crescenzo – We are each of us angels with only one wing, and we can only fly by embracing one another.
Lucy Maud Montgomery – I can’t help flying up on the wings of anticipation. It’s as glorious as soaring through a sunset… almost pays for the thud.
Luke Evans – When you’re working, you’re flying on someone else’s buck. When you’re flying on your own, you sort of go, ‘You know what, I’d rather keep the dosh in my pocket to spend when I get there.’

Madeleine L’Engle – In our dreams we are able to fly … and that is a remembering of how we were meant to be.
Mads Mikkelsen – The physicality of any character is always split up into fast, slow, high energy, low energy, what kind of personality he has. So that’s where the physicality comes in. And flying through the air is just something you have to do if they ask you.
Malcolm X – They cripple the bird’s wing, and then condemn it for not flying as fast as they.
Marc Jacobs – I mean, I’d love to have a private jet – I know people who fly by private jet all the time… I’ve hitched a ride a few times and it is not overrated at all; it’s a great way to travel!
Marc Reisner – I believe that anyone who flies in an airplane and doesn’t spend most of his time looking out the window wastes his money.
Margery Brown – Why do I want to fly? Because half-way between the earth and sky, one seems to be closer to God. There is a peace of mind and heart, a satisfaction which walls can not give. When I see an airplane flying I just ache all over to be up there. It isn’t for a fad, or a thrill, or pride.
Margot Robbie – I love flying so much. I even like airplane food. No one bothers you and your phone never goes off and you can’t have emails go through. It’s undisturbed.
Marianne Williamson – Always seek less turbulent skies. Hurt. Fly above it. Betrayal. Fly above it. Anger. Fly above it. You are the one who is flying the plane.
Marilyn Monroe – You might as well make yourself fly as to make yourself love.
Marina Warner – There’s a whole slew of wonderful speculation of flying in a fanciful way. Gulliver is one of the central examples; Swift has the hum of Arabian Nights in his ear with Gulliver’s Travels. The difference is in scale – Gulliver as a kind of Sinbad kind of figure, the way he is picked up and carried. Just to finish up with Scheherazade, I do think that The Arabian Nights could be considered as a great book on women’s position in the world.
Mark Twain – In this age of inventive wonders all men have come to believe that in some genius’ brain sleeps the solution of the grand problem of aerial navigation — and along with that belief is the hope that that genius will reveal his miracle before they die, and likewise a dread that he will poke off somewhere and die himself before he finds out that he has such a wonder lying dormant in his brain. We all know the air can be navigated — therefore, hurry up your sails and bladders —satisfy us — let us have peace.
Mark Twain – 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 Vanhoenacker – It’s congenital really. We’re an aspiring species that doesn’t have wings. What else would we dream of?
Martin Luther King, Jr. – We have flown the air like birds and swum the sea like fishes, but have yet to learn the simple act of walking the earth like brothers.
Martin Scorsese – Howard Hughes was this visionary who was obsessed with speed and flying like a god… I loved his idea of what filmmaking was.
Martin Scorsese – I’m very phobic about flying, but I’m also drawn to it.
Mary Garden – In the early 1930s, flying from England to Australia was the longest flight in the world. It was considered extremely dangerous and hazardous, pushing pilots to the limits of mechanical skills and human endurance. Aviation was young.
Mary Kay Ash – Aerodynamically, the bumble bee shouldn’t be able to fly, but the bumble bee doesn’t know it so it goes on flying anyway.
Matt Jones – You never lose the buzz of flying. Every time you take off, it feels a bit naughty, as if you’re doing something humans shouldn’t really do.
Mehmet Murat Ildan – Don’t forget that birds with broken wings walking on the ground were once flying high up in the sky.
Mehmet Murat Ildan – Every time a strong wind blows, every sand and dust yearns for being a solid rock and every solid rock longs for flying with the wind!
Mehmet Murat Ildan – In the dark days of your life, you will need the wings of hope to continue flying.
Merryl Tengesda – I have seen the curvature of the earth. I have seen sights most people will never see. Flying at more than 70,000 feet is really beautiful and peaceful. I enjoy the quiet, hearing myself breathing, and the hum of the engine. I never take it for granted.
Michael Jackson – I am Peter Pan. He represents youth, childhood, never growing up, magic, flying.
Michael Jordan – I don’t know about flying, but sometimes it feels like I have these little wings on my feet.
Michael Jordan – Not every flying hero has a cape.
Michael Light – Flying was certainly formative for me; I have a deep and lasting ease with it as a result.
Michael Light – I have a profound passion for the act of flying. It’s very freeing, with an intense physicality, but it also gives an Olympian, god’s-eye view, which fuels a larger cerebral and structural analysis.
Michael Light – I was flying planes before I was driving cars. I started gliding when I was fourteen, about when I started photographing. I was a geeky kid, and the camera was a way in high school for me to have some power. Flying was, too, I guess.
Michael Moore – I have a rule: I want the pilot flying me up in the air at 30,000 feet to make more than a guy working at Taco Bell.
Michael O’Donoghue – The transformation scene, where man is becoming insect and insect has become at least man and beyond that – a flying, godlike, shimmering, diaphanous, beautiful creature.
Michael P. Anderson – When you launch in a rocket, you’re not really flying that rocket. You’re just sort of hanging on.
Michel de Montaigne – The virtue of the soul does not consist in flying high, but in walking orderly.
Michelle Stuart – Flying used to be so great but now it’s more of a trial.
Mickey Rupp – Air racing may not be better than your wedding night, but it’s better than the second night.
Mira Calix – I find flying interesting in that it’s a very intimate experience. You’re so close, physically, to one or two other people and you eat, sleep, do everything together. I’ve met the most extraordinary people on planes, some of whom I’ve stayed in touch with, some I haven’t. Even if you’re beside someone who ignores you for eight hours, there’s a physicality you wouldn’t put up with from anyone other than someone you knew well. You’re in it together, even if you never say a word to one another.
Mitch Hedberg – Chicago is known as the Windy City, and Montana is called the Big Sky State, so I think that we should somehow combine the two to create the ultimate kite-flying experience.
Mitch Hedberg – I went to the park and saw this kid flying a kite. The kid was really excited. I don’t know why, that’s what they’re supposed to do. Now if he had had a chair on the other end of that string, I would have been impressed.
Morgan Freeman – When I was getting close to being accepted for pilot training, I was allowed to get in a jet airplane. I sat there looking at all those switches and dials and I got the distinct feeling that I was sitting in the nose of bomb. I realized my fantasies of flying and fighting were just that – fantasies.
Morley Safer – The helicopter is a fine way to travel, but it induces a view of the world that only God and CEOs share on a regular basis.
Muhammad Ali – I’ve been on planes flying through thunder storms when the pilot says, ‘ladies and gentlemen, we tried to fly around it but we can’t so it’s going to be rough’. And when a pilot says it’s going to be bad, it’s going to be rough. And you say to yourself, boy, I could have got the train.’

Nancy Bird Walton – I think, just the exhilaration of flying. The freedom of the air. The freedom of flight. And you completely remove yourself from the world. And you can voluntarily remove yourself from all those…everything that’s near and dear to you. And you voluntarily return.
Neil Armstrong – Ever since I was a little boy, I dreamed I would do something important in aviation.
Neil Armstrong – Pilots take no special joy in walking: pilots like flying.
Neil H. McElroy – In the space age, man will be able to go around the world in two hours – one hour for flying and one hour to get to the airport.
Nick Hanauer – The only really expensive thing in our family budget, frankly, is private air travel.
Nikos Kazantzakis – What happiness this is: to fly, skimming over the earth just as we do in our dreams! Life has become a dream. Can this be the meaning of paradise?
Nina Simone – Birds flying high you know how I feel / Sun in the sky you know how I feel / Breeze driftin’ on by you know how I feel / And this old world is a new world / And a bold world / For me / And I’m feeling good / I’m feeling good.
Noam Chomsky – The whole infrastructure of air travel was, and is, part of government policy. It is not a natural development of a free economic system – at least not in the way that is claimed. The same is true of the roads, of course.
Noam Chomsky – Today, we have private airline companies, but if you take a look at a Boeing plane next time you travel, you’ll see that you are basically taking a ride on a modified bomber.
Noel Coward – How was your flight? Well, aeronautically it was a great success. Socially, it left quite a bit to be desired.
Nora Roberts – Roarke: You’d enjoy flying more if you’d learn the controls. Eve: I’d rather pretend I’m on the ground. Roarke: And how many vehicles have you wrecked, had blown up, or destroyed in the last, oh, two years? Eve: Think about that, then imagine it happening when I’m at the wheel at thirty thousand feet. Roarke: Good point. I’ll do the flying.
Norman Foster – I love flying; I love aircraft, and you could say I’ve had a love affair with flight since I was a child. I travel a huge amount. I use airports, and as a pilot, I’ve flown in and out of airports thousands of times, so really, I have a fairly broad perspective.

O. Henry – Of habit, the power that keeps the earth from flying to pieces; though there is some silly theory of gravitation.
Octave Chanute – All agreed that the sensation of coasting on the air was delightful.
Octave Chanute – If there be one man, more than another, who deserves to succeed in flying through the air, that man is Mr. Laurence Hargrave, of Sydney, New South Wales.
Oliver Smithies – What flying teaches you is to overcome fear with knowledge.
Oprah Winfrey – Anyone that tells you that having your own private jet isn’t great is lying to you. That jet thing is really good.
Orson Welles – There are only two emotions in a plane: boredom and terror.
Orville Wright – Learning the secret of flight from a bird was a good deal like learning the secret of magic from a magician. After you know what to look for you see things that you did not notice when you did not know exactly what to look for.
Orville Wright – My brother climbed into the machine. The motor was started. With a short dash down the runway, the machine lifted into the air and was flying. It was only a flight of twelve seconds, and it was uncertain, wavy, creeping sort of flight at best; but it was a real flight at last and not a glide.
Orville Wright – The exhilaration of flying is too keen, the pleasure too great, for it to be neglected as a sport. It seems to me that its use will be somewhat similar to the automobile, as far as pleasure goes; that is, that people will have aeroplanes for pleasure runs, for fresh air, and for sight-seeing — perhaps even for touring, when starting devices are either carried along, or to be found readily at stopping points. There will be races, I suppose, and contests, and many of them will be beneficial as stimulative to inventive progress, just as races and contests have improved the automobile. But the greatest development in a sporting line, as I see it, will be for the pure pleasure of flying.
Otto Lilienthal – Every bird is an acrobat. Whoever would master the air must learn to imitate the bird’s dexterity. We must fly and fall, and fly and fall, until we can fly without falling.
Otto Lilienthal – No one can realize how substantial the air is, until he feels its supporting power beneath him. It inspires confidence at once.

Pappy Boyington – Flying is hours and hours of boredom sprinkled with a few seconds of sheer terror.
Paris Hilton – A man must walk before he can fly – one cannot fly into flying.
Pat Summitt – God doesn’t take things away to be cruel. He takes things away to make room for other things. He takes things away to lighten us. He takes things away so we can fly.
Patrick Overton – 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.
Patrick Stewart – Having played many roles of scientific intellect I do have an empathy for that world. It’s been hard on me because flying the Enterprise for seven years in Star Trek and sitting in Cerebro in X-men has led people to believe that I know what I’m talking about. But I’m still trying to work out how to operate the air conditioning unit on my car.
Paul Celan – Spring: trees flying up to their birds.
Paul J. Sampson – We contrive to make the invisible air support us, we relinquish the security of feet on the ground because flying is demanding, delightful, beautiful: because we love it. Very few of us are actually crazy, and nearly all of us manage the risks as well as we can, but we all willingly trade some of our security for the immeasurable beauty of the sky.
Paul MacCready – We humans are basically content with a two-dimensional world, which is what we’ve always occupied. We travel mostly on the ground, have traffic jams, parking problems, and we’d do a lot better to look up a little bit because there is that great aerial highway that’s always ready to go, you don’t have to pave it and the benefits are very great.
Paul Martin – Have you ever, on a cloudless night, looked down from a passing aircraft flying over Canada? Endless, glowing strings of cities, towns, and homesteads. Stretching on and on, one province to the next. With only the stars in the distance.
Paul Theroux – You define a good flight by negatives: you didn’t get hijacked, you didn’t crash, you didn’t throw up, you weren’t late, you weren’t nauseated by the food. So you are grateful.
Pauline Gower – No it was not the novelty, and it was not the danger and the adventure (although these had their charm). It was certainly not a passing whim (if it had been the hard work would have dispelled it in a very short time!). I think there were three chief reasons for my choice of career: First, a real love for, and interest in aviation Secondly, a determination to earn my own money and to make my career a paying proposition. Thirdly, a conviction that aviation was a profession of the future and therefore had room to welcome its new followers.
Pedro Almodovar – I’m a very dull passenger. I don’t speak. I don’t have sex. No alcohol. I don’t do drugs. The thing that I like about flying is that I feel like I can really concentrate. I used to write many things, and many ideas for my movies belong to this moment where I’m not anywhere specifically in terms of time and space and geography. I am suspended, and this suspension fits me very well.
Percy Knauth – Nowadays a businessman can go from his office straight to the airport, get into his airplane and fly six hundred or seven hundred miles without taking off his hat. He probably will not even mention this flight, which a bare twenty-five years ago would have meant wearing leather jacket and helmet and goggles and risking his neck every minute of the way. No, he probably wouldn’t mention it — except to another flier. Then they will talk for hours. They will re-create all the things seen and felt in that wonderful world of air: the sense of remoteness from the busy world below, the feeling of intense brotherhood formed with those who man the radio ranges and control towers and weather stations that bring the pilot home, the clouds and the colors, the surge of the wind on their wings. They will speak of things that are spiritual and beautiful and of things that are practical and utilitarian; they will mix up angels and engines, sunsets and spark plugs, fraternity and frequencies in one all-encompassing comradeship of interests that makes for the best and most lasting kind of friendship any man can have.
Peter Hook – At my age, I only travel business class because I just don’t bend anymore; my body can’t cope with it.
Peter Jacobson – I lived in New York, and I was the guy who was flying home almost every week, so there was a physical exhaustion and an emotional exhaustion for me, and a need to be home more.
Phil Collins – I remember flying with Air India to New York quite a few years ago now and I love Indian food, so the fact that I had a curry on board was fantastic.
Phil Collins – We’re all turkeys! Some of us are running around with our heads cut off, some of us are flapping our wings that hard we’re close to flying. But nothing is an eagle bar God.
Phil Collins – When I go on Japanese Airlines, I really love it because I like Japanese food.
Philip Cunliffe-Lister, 1st Earl of Swinton – We want the air to unite the peoples, and not to divide them.
Philip Sidney – As the fertilest ground, must be manured, so must the highest flying wit have a Daedalus to guide him.
Philip Wills – The air to a glider pilot is a reality … He is trying to understand it in all its moods; to learn its flow, its laws, and to try and use this knowledge to his own ends.
Philippe Perrin – It’s only when you’re flying above it that you realize how incredible the Earth really is
Plato – The natural function of the wing is to soar upwards and carry that which is heavy up to the place where dwells the race of gods. More than any other thing that pertains to the body it partakes of the nature of the divine.
Plautus – Flying without feathers is not easy: my wings have no feathers.
Ponce Denis Ecouchard Lebrun – The butterfly is a flying flower, The flower a tethered butterfly.
Priyanka Chopra – Flying is my favorite time in the world. When I’m sitting in a plane, it’s amazing because it’s quiet and there’s no cell phones and no one to talk to you. It’s my favorite time. I read all my scripts. I catch up on my movies. I sleep. It’s the best. There’s no one telling you, “Time to go!”

R. Key Dismukes – Being able to move in three dimensions … is just one of the happiest aspects of my life. If I every get a little unhappy, I go fly my airplane.
Rachel Hunter – It was all about flying round the world, working hard, being on the cover of Vogue, making money. It wasn’t fun. It was exhausting, but I was young and convinced I knew best.
Rachel McAdams – You know I never used to be a bad flyer, but I did start to have a fear of flying after I shot a movie where I was terrorized on a plane. I made Wes Craven’s ‘Red Eye’. I don’t think they’re linked but it does make me pause and wonder if they are, so perhaps I will explore that in therapy some day.
Rajneesh – In this life, your so-called ordinary life, you must be rooted; and in your inner space, in the spiritual life, you must be weightless and flying and flowing, floating.
Rajneesh – Sannyas is the art of flying… the art that stops the process of gravitation and starts the process of grace. All that is needed is a state of let-go. All that is needed is a readiness to be possessed by the upward dimension, a readiness to open to the sky.
Ralph Royce – It’s Bernoulli not Marconi that flies the airplane.
Raymonde de Laroche – Flying is the best possible thing for women.
Rebecca Moore – There’s that statement, “A picture is worth a thousand words” – well, I think flying around in Google Earth is worth a million words.
Regina Brett – There are few places you can find silence. Air travel could be the last fortress of solitude.
Renee O’Connor – Like when you go to a magic show and you know how they do the illusions. That’s how I am when I watch any movies where they have people flying through the air.
Renzo Piano – When you walk 25-30 feet above ground, it is a miracle, because you are still in the city … but you are flying above the city. You are in the middle of trees, and that is a moment of beauty.
Richard Bach – “Why, Jon, why?” his mother asked. “Why is it so hard to be like the rest of the flock, Jon? Why can’t you leave low flying to the pelicans, the albatross? Why don’t you eat? Son, you’re bone and feathers!” “I don’t mind being bone and feathers mom. I just want to know what I can do in the air and what I can’t, that’s all. I just want to know.”
Richard Bach – 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.
Richard Bach – 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.
Richard Bach – Flying prevails whenever a man and his airplane are put to a test of maximum performance.
Richard Bach – For most gulls it was not flying that matters, but eating. For this gull, though, it was not eating that mattered, but flight.
Richard Bach – He moves not through distance, but through the ranges of satisfaction that come from hauling himself up into the air with complete and utter control; from knowing himself and knowing his airplane so well that he can come somewhere close to touching, in his own special and solitary way, that thing that is called perfection.
Richard Bach – 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 – It had never gotten old for him, flying. Never gone boring. Every engine start was a new adventure, guiding the spirit of a lovely machine back into life; every takeoff blending his spirit with its own to do what’s never been done in history, to lift away from the ground and fly.
Richard Bach – The man who flies an airplane, then, to be the best possible pilot, must be a believer in the unseen.
Richard Bach – What I love doing is basically two things: I love flying airplanes and I love communication.
Richard Bach – When you’re flying, an airplane doesn’t care who you are; it doesn’t care how much money you make or don’t make. All it cares about is: How well do you fly? How well do you know the airplane? How well do you know the sky?
Richard Bach – 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.
Richard Branson – And ever since then I have set up businesses basically out of frustration. I mean, I set up Virgin Atlantic with one second-hand 747 because I hated the experience of flying on other people’s airlines. And I thought, you know, I could try to create the kind of airline that I’d like to fly on. And people liked it.
Richard Branson – Well, the odds must be against anybody being able to fly around the world in a balloon on the first attempt. All of us who are attempting to go around the world in balloons are effectively flying in experimental craft because these craft cannot be tested.
Richard Dawkins – Show me a cultural relativist at 30,000 feet and I’ll show you a hypocrite … If you are flying to an international congress of anthropologists or literary critics, the reason you will probably get there – the reason you don’t plummet into a ploughed field – is that a lot of Western scientifically trained engineers have got their sum right.
Richard Francis Burton – One cannot look at the sea without wishing for the wings of a swallow.
Richard Miller – The soaring pilot makes an aerial excursion, not an incursion. His passage leaves a whisper, not a shriek.
Richelle Mead – “We’re going on a, um, windmill tour later this week.” If I’d wanted to shut them all up, I’d definitely succeeded. They all looked stunned. Adrian spoke first. “I’m going to assume that means he’s flying you to Amsterdam on his private jet. If so, I’d like to come along. But not for the windmills.”
Rick Mercer – I am very excited to accept the role of Honorary Patron with Hope Air because of the national scope of the organization and the very real impact they have on Canadians who need to travel to healthcare.
Rick Perry – But it wasn’t until I graduated from Texas A & M University and joined the United States Air Force, flying C-130’s all around the globe, that I truly appreciated the blessings of freedom.
Rick Riordan – I was flying right toward him (the pig) at the speed of demigod-smashing.
Ridley Scott – I think there’s nothing worse than inertia. You can inert and study your navel and gradually you’ll fall off the chair. I think the key is to keep flying.
Roald Dahl – I was a fighter pilot, flying Hurricanes all round the Mediterranean. I flew in the Western Desert of Libya, in Greece, in Syria, in Iraq and in Egypt.
Robert Burton – If the heavens be penetrable, 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.
Robert Hunter – Poised for flight, Wings spread bright, Spring from night into the Sun.
Robert Louis Stevenson – How do you like to go up in a swing, Up in the air so blue? Oh, I do think it the pleasantest thing Ever a child can do! Up in the air and over the wall, Till I can see so wide, River and trees and cattle and all Over the countryside. Till I look down on the garden green, Down on the roof so brown- Up in the air I go flying again, Up in the air and down!
Robert Pattinson – When I was flying to Rome, we flew over London; I felt like bursting into tears. It’s part of me, so I can’t leave London behind for good.
Robert Plant – Maybe I’m just flying my own little ego ship, but sometimes people resent talent.
Robert Six – I’ve never known an industry that can get into people’s blood the way aviation does.
Robin Wall Kimmerer – Between takeoff and landing, we are each in suspended animation, a pause between chapters of our lives. When we stare out the window into the sun’s glare, the landscape is only a flat projection with mountain ranges reduced to wrinkles in the continental skin. Oblivious to our passage overhead, other stories are unfolding beneath us. Blackberries ripen in the August sun; a woman packs a suitcase and hesitates at her doorway; a letter is opened and the most surprising photograph slides from between the pages. But we are moving too fast and we are too far away; all the stories escape us, except our own.
Romain Rolland – Take possession of the air, submit the elements, penetrate the last redoubts of nature, make space retreat, make death retreat.
Ron Reagan – I have to say that flying on Air Force One sort of spoils you for coach on a regular airline.
Ron Weber – Never stop flying the airplane.
Ronald Firbank – There was a pause – just long enough for an angel to pass, flying slowly.
Rosanne Cash – On the plane, an eight-year-old with an excess of testosterone keeps running across my feet. Finally I grab him by his T-shirt and say, very sweetly, ‘Listen, darling, if you don’t stop trampling me I’m going to make you sit on my lap while I tell you my entire life story. Including a lot of details about drug rehab and my divorce.’ He goes back to his seat.
Roy Niederhoffer – The way an aircraft flies – that is the way the strategy works. Most of the time the plane is on autopilot, and does a great job of flying itself. Every once in a while it is necessary for the pilot to jump in.
Rumi – How will you know the difficulties of being human, if you are always flying off to blue perfection? Where will you plant your grief seeds? Workers need ground to scrape and hoe, not the sky of unspecified desire.
Rupert Grint – I’d like to have the flying car, I think that’d be really cool.
Rupert Grint – My favorite scene in this film was the flying car, because that was just wicked.
Rush Limbaugh – I never really knew what it meant, to win, until one day I was flying on the Phoenix Suns airplane, the team plane, on the way to Chicago. I was talking to Danny Ainge on this flight, and he was talking about the concept of knowing how to win. And so he proceeded to give me from his perspective as an athlete, and now he’s a coach, what the whole concept of knowing how to win is, and he said part of it is rooted in experience, the experience of winning, but it’s attitudinal, it’s the belief that you should, it’s the belief that you can, it’s the belief.
Russell Simmons – Black actors on the road, flying around the country working as poets. Those people are inspirations for millions of kids who write.
Rusty Schweickart – As you pass from sunlight into darkness and back again every hour and a half, you become startlingly 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. The dissonance between this unity you see and the seperateness of human groupings that you know exists is starkly apparent.
Ruzwana Bashir – Before redeye flights, I drink copious amounts of herbal brews to help me relax and fall asleep after takeoff.
Ryszard Kapuscinski – Pack the one bag. Unpack it, pack it, unpack it, pack it: passport, ticket, book, taxi, airport, check-in, beer, announcement, stairs, airplane, fasten seat-belt, air born, flight, rocking, sun, stars, space, hips of strolling stewardesses, read, sleep, clouds, falling engine speed, descent, circling, touch down, earth, unfasten seat-belt, stairs, airport, immunization book, visa, customs, questions, taxi, streets, houses, people, hotel, key, room, stuffiness, thirst, otherness, foreignness, loneliness, fatigue, life.

Saburō Sakai – But to fly is just like swimming. You do not forget easily. I have been on the ground for more than ten years. If I close my eyes, however, I can again feel the stick in my right hand, the throttle in my left, the rudder bar beneath my feet. I can sense the freedom and the cleanliness and all the things which a pilot knows.
Sadako Sasaki – I will write peace on your wings and you will fly all over the world.
Samuel Butler – Flying. Whatever any other organism has been able to do man should surely be able to do also, though he may go a different way about it.
Samuel Hynes – It isn’t often that a writer of superlative skills knows enough about flying to write well about it.
Samuel Johnson – He that can swim needs not despair to fly; to swim is to fly in a grosser fluid, and to fly is to swim in a subtler. We are only to proportion our power of resistance to the different density of matter through which we are to pass. You will be necessarily upborne by the air if you can renew any impulse upon it faster than the air can recede from the pressure… The labor of rising from the ground will be great, … but as we mount higher, the earth’s attraction, and the body’s gravity, will be gradually diminished till we arrive at a region where the man will float in the air without any tendency to fall.
Sara Blakely – I took a Fear of Flying class, and I always missed the class, because I was always flying.
Sarah Dessen – From this distance, in the dimness, the model looked surreal, made up of parts filled with buildings, bordered by long stretches of empty space. It reminded me of the way cities and towns look when you are flying at night. You can’t make out much. But the places where people have come together, and stayed, are collections of tiny lights, breaking up the darkness.
Sarah Waters – I used to hate flying. I would sit there, rigid, convinced that if I relaxed, the plane would drop out of the sky.
Scott Carpenter – It’s a spiritual experience for anybody with a soul, I think, and I got that. It’s a religious experience for some, maybe they’ve got two or three souls, I don’t know. So, personally, it was a cherished experience. I feel I got the chance to see the inner workings of the grand order of things. In the overall scheme of things, it proves that men can do about anything they want to if they work hard enough at it, and I knew that I could do it, and that’s a good thought. And that leads, of course, to a strong suspicion that everybody else can do it if they want to.
Scott Westerfeld – He makes me feel like that. Like flying.
Shahrukh Khan – 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.
Shekhar Kapur – Filmmaking is a great adventure. I’m as excited as a kid to be given tickets to fly suddenly to England, South Africa, America, everywhere. I’m still a 13-year-old kid, flying.
Sherrilyn Kenyon – Don’t worry if I lay my head back and start to snore while we’re flying. It’s normal.
Sidney Lanier – 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.
Simon Newcomb – Flight by machines heavier than air is unpractical and insignificant, if not utterly impossible.
Simon Newcomb – Quite likely the twentieth century is destined to see the natural forces which will enable us to fly from continent to continent with a speed far exceeding that of a bird.
Simon Newcomb – The mathematician of to-day admits that he can neither square the circle, duplicate the cube or trisect the angle. May not our mechanicians, in like manner, be ultimately forced to admit that aerial flight is one of that great class of problems with which men can never cope… I do not claim that this is a necessary conclusion from any past experience. But I do think that success must await progress of a different kind from that of invention.
Simon Sinek – I couldn’t understand why my productivity went down when I had deliberately made more time available to write. Then I realized it was because I wasn’t flying as much.
Socrates – 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.
Sophocles – Every wind is fare when we are flying from misfortune.
Spalding Gray – He won’t fly on the Balinese airline, Garuda, because he won’t fly on any airline where the pilots believe in reincarnation.
Stanley Kunitz – Deftly they opened the brain of a child, and it was full of flying dreams.
Stanton T. Friedman – Abstract: Careful review of a vast array of relevant evidence clearly leads to the conclusion that some unidentified flying objects are intelligently controlled vehicles whose origin is outside our solar system. All the arguments against the extraterrestrial origin seem to be based upon false reasoning, misrepresentation of evidence, neglect of relevant information, ignorance of relevant technology, or pseudo sophisticated assumptions about alien appearance, motivation, or government secrecy…
Stephen Colletti – I love flying and kind of just fascinated with it, and to fly something like an F-22 would be a blast.
Stephen Coonts – All really great flying adventures begin at dawn.
Stephen Coonts – 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.
Stephen Coonts – 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.
Stephen Hawking – A zero-gravity flight is a first step toward space travel.
Stephen Schwartz – So if you care to find me/ Look to the western sky/ As someone told me lately/ Everyone deserves the chance to fly!/ And if I’m flying solo/ At least I’m flying free/ Tell those who’d ground me/ Take a message back from me/ Tell them how I am defying gravity!/ I’m flying high defying gravity/ And soon I’ll match them in renown./ And nobody in all of Oz/ No Wizard that there is or was/ Is ever gonna bring me down!
Steve Fossett – The good thing about flying solo is it’s never boring.
Steve Fossett – This is a Solo Flight, but I want aviation enthusiasts and adventurers everywhere to join me in the endeavour.
Steven Soderbergh – If you’re not flying people around on wires, and you’re only allowing them to do things that people can really do, it can’t go on for very long, because eventually somebody gets the drop on the other person and then it’s over.
Sue Monk Kidd – At night I would lie in bed and watch the show, how bees squeezed through the cracks of my bedroom wall and flew circles around the room, making that propeller sound, a high-pitched zzzzzz that hummed along my skin. I watched their wings shining like bits of chrome in the dark and felt the longing build in my chest. The way those bees flew, not even looking for a flower, just flying for the feel of the wind, split my heart down its seam.
Sue Monk Kidd – It was the oldest sound there was. Souls flying away.
Susan Orlean – I finally overcame my phobia, and now I approach flying with a sort of studied boredom – a learned habit, thanks to my learn-to-fly-calmly training – but like all former flying phobics, I retain a weird and feverish fascination with aviation news, especially bad news.
Susan Sontag – Can I love someone…and still think/fly? Love is flying, sown, floating. Thought is solitary flight, beating wings.

T.E. Lawrence – The conquest of the last element, the air, seems to me the only major task of our generation; and I have convinced myself that progress to-day is made not by the single genius, but by the common effort.
Ted Danson – If you take one rivet out of an airplane, it will be all right, it’ll keep flying. You take another rivet out of the airplane and it still flies. So what the heck, let’s take more rivets out of the airplane, and sooner or later, the airplane drops from the sky.
Terence Winter – I guess … I’m going to get that ice cream sundae they give you on the airplane. I usually pass on that, but I think I’m actually going to get extra whipped cream and maybe even the chocolate syrup. I’m really winging it here. I’m going to be flying. It’s really a little too early to start drinking.
Terry Gross – My father modestly referred to himself as the Great Santini when we were growing up. And he took it – I later learned he had seen a high-wire aerialist when he was a boy, and he was up doing acrobatics in his airplane, and when he came down one time – when was a young lieutenant – he said, I was better than the Great Santini today. And some of the other pilots heard it, and the nickname stuck.
The Great Khali – On flights, I cannot travel economy class, as I am too huge to fit into that space. I always have to travel business class.
Thomas Gray – The time will come, when thou shalt lift thine eyes To watch a long-drawn battle in the skies. While aged peasants, too amazed for words, Stare at the flying fleets of wondrous birds.
Thomas Petzinger Jr. – Flying is an act of conquest, of defeating the most basic and powerful forces of nature.
Thomas Petzinger Jr. – 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.
Thomas Pynchon – Real flight and dreams of flight go together. Both are part of the same movement. Not A before B, but all together.
Titus Maccius Plautus – Flying without feathers is not easy; my wings have no feathers.
Tom Conti – When the plane is delayed, it’s not the fault of the girl at the desk. I’m resigned to the fact that everything is out of my control and that air travel nowadays is barbaric.
Tom Hanks – I hope my kids understand that they’re not operating in a normal world. And yet there are principles they have to adhere to that are normal – like decency, choosing between right and wrong, and honesty. That’s important stuff, whether you’re flying first-class or not.
Tom Paulin – I think ideas should be flying about and banging into each other. It is a kind of energy. If you occupy static positions, then things sort of ossify.
Tom Robbins – Be your own flying saucer! Rescue yourself!
2 Chainz – I’m drunk and high at the same time. Drinking champagne on the airplane.

Unknown – A mile of highway will take you a mile. A mile of runway will take you anywhere.
Unknown – Until you spread your wings, you have no idea how far you’ll fly.
Uri Geller – I think I usually have quite ordinary dreams. Sometimes my dreams take me to other dimensions. I can travel in my mind especially when I’m dreaming I focus my mind on what I want to dream. If I want to fly, I focus on flying.

Victor Hugo – Every bird which flies has the thread of the infinite in its claw.
Vince McMahon – It’s difficult to do that internally, because you’re flying five, six hours.
Virginia Postrel – The glamour of air travel – its aspirational meaning in the public imagination – disappeared before its luxury did, dissipating as flying gradually became commonplace.
Virginia Woolf – In the 18th century we knew how everything was done, but here I rise through the air, I listen to voices in America, I see men flying- but how is it done? I can’t even begin to wonder. So my belief in magic returns.
Vladimir Nabokov – Human thought, flying on the trapezes of the star-filled universe, with mathematics stretched beneath, was like an acrobat working with a net but suddenly noticing that in reality there is no net.
Voltaire – Being a bird ain’t all about flying and shitting from high places.

W. G. Sebald – No matter whether one is flying over Newfoundland or the sea of lights that stretches from Boston to Philadelphia after nightfall, over the Arabian deserts which gleam like mother-of-pearl, over the Ruhr or the city of Frankfurt, it is as though there were no people, only the things they have made and in which they are hiding.
Walt Whitman – O to speed where there is space enough and air enough at last!
Walter Alexander Raleigh – The engine is the heart of an aeroplane, but the pilot is its soul.
Wangechi Mutu – We became Homo sapiens not that long ago, from the scientific perspective, and we’ve retained a lot of our beast nature. We’ve done all these amazing things in terms of our knowledge base and technology, and now we’re flying around and using the internet. But we’re still very animalistic. So, I think about hierarchies. I think about evolution. I think about how we stack up, how we sit on top of each other. How we pray that we know what we’re up to.
Wayne Dyer – The law of flying was not discovered by the contemplation of things staying on the ground.
Wendell Willkie – 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.
Wernher von Braun – It will free man from the remaining chains, the chains of gravity which still tie him to this planet. It will open to him the gates of heaven.
Wilbur Wright – For some years I have been afflicted with the belief that flight is possible to man. The disease has increased in severity and I feel it will soon cost me an increased amount of money, if not my life. I have been trying to arrange my affairs in such a way that I can devote my entire time for a few months to experiment in this field.
Wilbur Wright – The desire to fly is an idea handed down to us by our ancestors who, in their grueling travels across trackless lands in prehistoric times, looked enviously on the birds soaring freely through space, at full speed, above all obstacles, on the infinite highway of the air.
Wilfred Owen – Flying is the only active profession I could ever continue with enthusiasm after the War.
Will Carleton – Yellow, mellow, ripened days, Sheltered in a golden coating; O’er the dreamy, listless haze, White and dainty cloudlets floating; Winking at the blushing trees, And the sombre, furrowed fallow; Smiling at the airy ease, Of the southward flying swallow Sweet and smiling are thy ways, Beauteous, golden Autumn days.
Willard Wigan – Flying helicopters is what I do for fun.
William Atherton – Whenever you do a movie, it’s a culture shock. Who is it? Where are you? What are you doing? Who are these people? Where are you going now? It’s kind of like how somebody describes private flying: It’s hours of monotony punctuated by moments of stark terror. That’s what it’s like anywhere in the world, whether you’re in Texas or Bucharest.
William Blake – No bird soars too high if he soars with his own wings.
William Ellery Channing – My highway is unfeatured air, My consorts are the sleepless Stars.
William Langewiesche – I sometimes still go out hunting for bad weather, flying low in simple airplanes to explore the inner reaches of the clouds. Less experienced pilots occasionally join me, not to learn formal lessons about weather flying, but with a more advanced purpose in mind – to accompany me in the slow accumulation of experience through circumstances that never repeat in a place that defies mastery.
William Langewische – Often I have a feeling about how strange it would be not to fly. I ask people who don’t fly, ‘How can you not fly when you live in a time in history when you can fly?’ and, ‘How can you ever really know where you are if you don’t fly?’ I think people who don’t fly have no idea of their own blindness, and of the geographic orientation of the world that a pilot does have … Flying is a fundamental liberation of the mind.
William Law – What can you conceive more silly and extravagant than to suppose a man racking his brains, and studying night and day how to fly?
William P. Young – You… were created to be loved. So for you to live as if you were unloved is a limitation, not the other way around… Living unloved is like clipping a bird’s wing and removing its ability to fly… A bird is not defined by being grounded but by his ability to fly. Remember this, humans are defined not by their limitations, but by the intentions I have for them; not by what they seem to be, but by everything it means to be created in my image. Love is NOT the limitation; love is the flying. I AM love.
William Shakespeare – Love like a shadow flies when substance love pursues Pursuing that that flies, and flying what pursues.
William Shakespeare – My soul is in the sky.
William T. Piper – Once you have learned to fly your plane, it is far less fatiguing to fly than it is to drive a car. You don’t have to watch every second for cats, dogs, children, lights, road signs, ladies with baby carriages and citizens who drive out in the middle of the block against the lights … Nobody who has not been up in the sky on a glorious morning can possibly imagine the way a pilot feels in free heaven.
Wolfgang Langewiesche – Flying is done largely with the imagination.

Yip Harburg – If happy little bluebirds fly beyond the rainbow, why oh why can’t I?
Yuri Gagarin – I saw for the first time the earth’s shape. I could easily see the shores of continents, islands, great rivers, folds of the terrain, large bodies of water. The horizon is dark blue, smoothly turning to black. . . the feelings which filled me I can express with one word-joy.
Yuri I. Manin – What binds us to space-time is our rest mass, which prevents us from flying at the speed of light, when time stops and space loses meaning. In a world of light there are neither points nor moments of time; beings woven from light would live “nowhere” and “nowhen”; only poetry and mathematics are capable of speaking meaningfully about such things.
Yves Rossy – Flying is absolute freedom. I know the feeling of flying from various aircraft. But there was always something surrounding me that I had to control. As Fusion Man, it’s like I am naked, I only have the wings that carry me. It’s like a dream.
Yves Rossy – I was a pilot and flying hang gliders, paragliders, aerobatics airplanes, and then I discovered skydiving. Free fall. Free. With nothing around you, just a parachute on your back. And you go down. But you don’t feel like you’re going down. Total freedom.

Conclusion

In the tapestry of human expression, the best quotes about flying serve as timeless reminders of our innate desire to transcend earthly boundaries and reach for the stars. Each phrase, a poetic feather in the cap of our collective imagination, propels us into the boundless realms of possibility. Whether penned by literary giants, aviation pioneers, or modern thinkers, the best flying quotes stand as testaments to the enduring allure of flight — the eternal dance between gravity and the human spirit. So, as we navigate the skies of inspiration, may these words lift your soul, reminding you that the pursuit of dreams is an endless ascent into the infinite skies of human potential. Fly on, dreamers, for the horizon is but a starting point in the grand adventure of life.

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