Richard Bach Quotes (120) Spiritual Sayings
About the Author: Richard David Bach (born June 23, 1936) is an American writer. He is widely known as the author of the hugely popular 1970s best-sellers Jonathan Livingston Seagull and Illusions: The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah, among others. Bach's books espouse his philosophy that our apparent physical limits and mortality are merely appearance. He claims to be a direct descendant of Johann Sebastian Bach. Bach is noted for his love of flying and for his books related to air flight and flying in a metaphorical context. He has pursued flying as a hobby since the age of 17. In late August 2012 Bach was badly injured when on approach to landing at Friday Harbor his aircraft clipped some power lines and crashed upside down in a field. See website for more info - http://richardbach.com/
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“Can miles truly separate you from friends... If you want to be with someone you love, aren't you already there?”
― Richard Bach
“Your friends will know you better in the first minute you meet than your acquaintances will know you in a thousand years.”
― Richard Bach
“You're never given a dream without also being given the power to make it true.”
― Richard Bach, Illusions: The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah
“Your conscience is the measure of the honesty of your selfishness.
Listen to it carefully.”
― Richard Bach, Illusions: The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah
“The bond that links your true family is not one of blood, but of respect and joy in each other's life. Rarely do members of one family grow up under the same roof.”
― Richard Bach, Illusions: The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah
“I’m here not because I am supposed to be here, or because I’m trapped here, but because I’d rather be with you than anywhere else in the world.”
― Richard Bach, The Bridge Across Forever: A True Love Story
“A soulmate is someone who has locks that fit our keys, and keys to fit our locks. When we feel safe enough to open the locks, our truest selves step out and we can be completely and honestly who we are; we can be loved for who we are and not for who we’re pretending to be. Each unveils the best part of the other. No matter what else goes wrong around us, with that one person we’re safe in our own paradise. Our soulmate is someone who shares our deepest longings, our sense of direction. When we’re two balloons, and together our direction is up, chances are we’ve found the right person. Our soulmate is the one who makes life come to life. ”
― Richard Bach
“Don’t believe what your eyes are telling you. All they show is limitation. Look with your understanding. Find out what you already know and you will see the way to fly.”
― Richard Bach, Jonathan Livingston Seagull
“Every person, all the events of your life are there because you have drawn them there. What you choose to do with them is up to you.”
― Richard Bach
“I do not exist to impress the world. I exist to live my life in a way that will make me happy. ”
― Richard Bach, Illusions: The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah
“If your happiness depends on what somebody else does, I guess you do have a problem.”
― Richard Bach
“What the caterpillar calls the end of the world, the master calls a butterfly.”
― Richard Bach, Illusions: The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah
“Don't be dismayed at good-byes. A farewell is necessary before you can meet again. And meeting again, after moments or lifetimes, is certain for those who are friends.”
― Richard Bach, Illusions: The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah
“Your only obligation in any lifetime is to be true to yourself.”
― Richard Bach, Illusions
“Argue for your limitations and, sure enough, they're yours.”
― Richard Bach
“A professional writer is an amateur who didn't quit.”
― Richard Bach
“No matter how qualified or deserving we are, we will never reach a better life until we can imagine it for ourselves and allow ourselves to have it.”
― Richard Bach
“Remember where you came from, where you're going, and why you created this mess you got yourself into in the first place.”
― Richard Bach, Illusions
“That’s why love stories don’t have endings! They don’t have endings because love doesn’t end.”
― Richard Bach, The Bridge Across Forever: A True Love Story
“That’s what learning is, after all; not whether we lose the game, but how we lose and how we’ve changed because of it, and what we take away from it that we never had before, to apply to other games. Losing, in a curious way is winning.”
― Richard Bach, The Bridge Across Forever: A True Love Story
“When you have come to the edge of all the light you have
And step into the darkness of the unknown
Believe that one of the two will happen to you
Either you'll find something solid to stand on
Or you'll be taught how to fly!”
― Richard Bach
“Bad things are not the worst things that an happen to us. NOTHING is the worst thing that can happen to us.”
― Richard Bach, One
“Boredom between two people doesn't come from being together physically. It comes from being apart mentally and spiritually.”
― Richard Bach, The Bridge Across Forever: A True Love Story
“Here is a test to find whether your mission on Earth is finished: If you´re alive it isn't.”
― Richard Bach, The Bridge Across Forever: A True Love Story
“Wrong turns are as important as right turns. More important, sometimes.”
― Richard Bach, One
“You're always free to change your mind
and choose a different future, or a different past.”
― Richard Bach
“If our friendship depends on things like space and time, then when we finally overcome space and time, we've destroyed our own brotherhood! But overcome space, and all we have left is Here. Overcome time, and all we have left is Now. And in the middle of Here and Now, don't you think that we might see each other once or twice?”
― Richard Bach
“Listen to what you know instead of what you fear.”
― Richard Bach
“We teach best what we most need to learn.”
― Richard Bach, Illusions: The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah
“A tiny change today brings a dramatically different tomorrow.”
― Richard Bach, One
“It must happen to us all…We pack up what we’ve learned so far and leave the familiar behind. No fun, that shearing separation, but somewhere within, we must dimly know that saying goodbye to safety brings the only security we’ll ever know.”
― Richard Bach, Running from Safety: An Adventure of the Spirit
“To bring anything into your life, imagine that it's already there.”
― Richard Bach, The Bridge Across Forever: A True Love Story
“If you will practice being fictional for a while, you will understand that fictional characters are sometimes more real than people with bodies and heartbeats.”
― Richard Bach, Illusions: The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah
“You are never given a wish without also being given the power to make it come true.”
― Richard Bach, The Bridge Across Forever: A True Love Story
“In order to live free and happily, you must sacrifice boredom. It is not always an easy choice.”
― Richard Bach
“There is no such thing as a problem without a gift for you in its hands. You seek problems because you need their gifts.”
― Richard Bach
“You have the freedom to be yourself, your true self, here and now, and nothing can stand in your way".”
― Richard Bach, Jonathan Livingston Seagull
“The only thing that shatters dreams is compromise.”
― Richard Bach, The Bridge Across Forever: A True Love Story
“Listen,' he said. 'It's important. We are all. Free. To do. Whatever. We want. To do.”
― Richard Bach, Illusions: The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah
“True love stories never have endings.”
― Richard Bach
“You are never given a dream without also being given the power to make it true. You may have to work for it, however.”
― Richard Bach
“Learning is finding out what you already know. Doing is demonstrating that you know it. Teaching is reminding others that they know just as well as you. You are all learners, doers, teachers.”
― Richard Bach
“I had grown up in a house with a fence around it, and in this fence was a white smooth wooden gate, two holes bored round and low together so the dog could see through. One night, the moon high, late for me home from the school dance, I remember that I stopped, hand on the gate, and spoke so quietly to myself and to the woman that I would love that not even the dog could have heard.
I don’t know where you are, but you’re living right now, somewhere on this earth. And one day you and I are going to touch this gate where I’m touching it now. Your hand will touch this very wood, here! Then we’ll walk through and we’ll be full of a future and of a past and we’ll be to each other like no one else has ever been. We can’t meet now, I don’t know why. But some day our questions will be answers and we’ll be caught in something so bright...and every step I take is one step closer on a bridge we must cross to meet.”
― Richard Bach, The Bridge Across Forever: A True Love Story
“Of course there’s destiny, but destiny doesn’t push you where you don’t want to go. You’re the ones who choose. Destiny is up to you.”
― Richard Bach, One
“Look in the mirror and one thing is sure: what we see is not who we are.”
― Richard Bach, The Bridge Across Forever: A True Love Story
“There are no mistakes. The events we bring upon ourselves, no matter how unpleasant, are necessary in order to learn what we need to learn; whatever steps we take, they're necessary to reach the places we've chosen to go.”
― Richard Bach, The Bridge Across Forever: A True Love Story
“You will begin to touch heaven, Jonathan, in the moment that you touch perfect speed. And that isn’t flying a thousand miles an hour, or a million, or flying at the speed of light. Because any number is a limit, and perfection doesn’t have limits. Perfect speed, my son, is being there.”
― Richard Bach, Jonathan Livingston Seagull
“One way to pick a future is to believe it’s inevitable.”
― Richard Bach, One
“The simplest questions are the most profound. Where were you born? Where is your home? Where are you going? What are you doing? Think about these once in a while and watch your answers change.”
― Richard Bach
“There’s no disaster that can’t become a blessing, and no blessing that can’t become a disaster.”
― Richard Bach, One
“The meaning I picked, the one that changed my life: Overcome fear, behold wonder.”
― Richard Bach
“If you love someone, set them free. If they come back they're yours; if they don't they never were.”
― Richard Bach
“The opposite of Loneliness is not Togetherness , It's Intimacy”
― Richard Bach
“Have you ever felt so at one with the world, with the universe, with everything that is, that you were overcome with love? That is reality. That is the truth. What we make of it is up to us, as the painting of the sunrise is up to the artist. In our world humanity has strayed from that love. It lives hatred and power struggles and manipulations of the earth itself for its own narrow reasons. Continue and no one will see the sunrise. The sunrise will always exist, of course, but people on earth will know nothing of it and finally even stories of its beauty will fade from our knowing.”
― Richard Bach, One
“It doesn’t take time to change once you understand the problem...Somebody hands you a rattlesnake, it doesn’t take long to drop it, does it?”
― Richard Bach, One
“Believe you know all the answers, and you know all the answers. Believe you're a master, and you are.”
― Richard Bach, Illusions: The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah
“Choose a love and work to make it true, and somehow, something will happen, something you couldn’t plan, will come along to move like to like, to set you loose, to set you on the way to your next brick wall.”
― Richard Bach, Running from Safety: An Adventure of the Spirit
“He was not bone and feather but a perfect idea of freedom and flight, limited by nothing at all”
― Richard Bach, Jonathan Livingston Seagull
“Next to ‘God’, ‘love’ is the word most mangled in every language.”
― Richard Bach, The Bridge Across Forever: A True Love Story
“An easy life doesn't teach us anything. In the end it's the learning that matters: what we've learned and how we've grown”
― Richard Bach, One
“Get this in mind early: We never grow up.”
― Richard Bach
“Don't you think between here and now we will see each other once or twice?”
― Richard Bach
“When we put up with any situation we don’t have to put up with, it’s not because we’re dumb. We put up with it, because we want the lesson only that situation can teach, and we want it more than freedom myself.”
― Richard Bach, Running from Safety: An Adventure of the Spirit
“Jonathan sighed. The price of being misunderstood, he thought. They call you devil or they call you god.”
― Richard Bach, Jonathan Livingston Seagull
“Character comes from following our highest sense of right, from trusting ideas without being sure they’ll work.”
― Richard Bach, One
“The best way to avoid responsibility is to say, 'I've got
responsibilities.”
― Richard Bach, Illusions: The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah
“It’s not when you start that makes your success in the world, but when you quit.”
― Richard Bach, Nothing by Chance
“Any powerful idea is absolutely fascinating and absolutely useless until we choose to use it.”
― Richard Bach, One
“Nobody means to get carried away in mediocrity, but it happens, it happens unless you think about everything you do, unless you make every choice the best one you know how to make.”
― Richard Bach, One
“The world is your exercise book, the pages on which you do your sums. It is not reality, though you may express reality there if you wish. You are also free to write lies, or nonsense, or to tear the pages.”
― Richard Bach, Illusions: The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah
“The simplest things are often the truest.”
― Richard Bach
“Your whole body, from wingtip to wingtip," Jonathan would say, other times, "is nothing more than your thought itself, in a form you can see. Break the chains of your thought, and you break the chains of your body, too.”
― Richard Bach, Jonathan Livingston Seagull
“We can lift ourselves out of ignorance, we can find ourselves as creatures of excellence and intelligence and skill.”
― Richard Bach, Jonathan Livingston Seagull
“Heaven is not a place, and it is not a time. Heaven is being perfect. -And that isn't flying a thousand miles an hour, or a million, or flying at the speed of light. Because any number is a limit, and perfection doesn't have limits. Perfect speed, my son, is being there.”
― Richard Bach, Jonathan Livingston Seagull
“Everything is exactly as it is for a reason.
The crumb on your table is
no mystical reminder of this morning's cookie,
it is there because you have chosen not to remove it.
No exceptions.”
― Richard Bach, Messiah's Handbook: Reminders for the Advanced Soul
“The mark of your ignorance is the depth of your belief in injustice and tragedy. What the caterpillar calls the end of the world, the master calls a butterfly.”
― Richard Bach
“The gull sees farthest who flies highest”
― Richard Bach, Jonathan Livingston Seagull
“From time to time it's fun to close our eyes, and in that dark say to ourselves, 'I am the sorcerer, and when I open my eyes I shall see a world that I have created, and for which I and only I am completely responsible.' Slowly then, eyelids open like curtains lifting stage-center. And sure enough, there's our world, just the way we've built it.”
― Richard Bach, The Bridge Across Forever: A True Love Story
“If it's never our fault, we can't take responsibility for it. If we can't take responsibility for it, we'll always be its victim.”
― Richard Bach
“At last, the answer why. The lesson that had been so hard to find, so difficult to learn, came quick and clear and simple. The reason for problems is to overcome them. Why, that’s the very nature of man, I thought, to press past limits, to prove his freedom. It isn’t the challenge that faces us, that determines who we are and what we are becoming, but the way we meet the challenge, whether we toss a match at the wreck or work our way through it, step by step, to freedom.”
― Richard Bach, Nothing by Chance
“Know that ever about you stands the reality of love, and each moment you have the power to transform your world by what you have learned.”
― Richard Bach, One
“Part of us is always the observer, and no matter what, it observes. It watches us. It does not care if we are happy or unhappy, if we are sick or well, if we live or die. It’s only job is to sit there on our shoulder and pass judgment on whether we are worthwhile human beings.”
― Richard Bach, The Bridge Across Forever: A True Love Story
“How much to learn if we could spend one hour, spend twenty minutes, with the us we will become! How much could we say to the us we were.”
― Richard Bach, The Bridge Across Forever: A True Love Story
“Heaven is not a place, and it's not a time. Heaven is being perfect.”
― Richard Bach, Jonathan Livingston Seagull
“There are grand rewards for those who pick the high hard roads, but those rewards are hidden by years.”
― Richard Bach, One
“Whatever enchants also guides and protects.”
― Richard Bach, The Bridge Across Forever: A True Love Story
“Passionately obsessed by anything we love--an avalanche of magic flattens the way ahead, levels, rules, reasons, dissents, bears us with it over chasms, fears, doubts. Without the power of that love....”
― Richard Bach, The Bridge Across Forever: A True Love Story
“What matters is how I use what I know, every minute of every day; how I use it to remember, in the midst of the game.”
― Richard Bach, Running from Safety: An Adventure of the Spirit
“You teach best what you most need to learn”
― Richard Bach
“The worst lies are the lies we tell ourselves. We live in denial of what we do, even what we think. We do this because we're afraid.We fear we will not find love,and when we find it we fear we'll lose it. We fear that if we don't have love we will be unhappy.”
― Richard Bach
“Every problem has a gift for you in its hands.”
― Richard Bach
“The original sin is to limit the Is. Don't.”
― Richard Bach, Illusions
“The river delights to lift us free, if only we dare let go.”
― Richard Bach
“Has it ever happened, you’ve seen a striking film, beautifully written and acted and photographed, that you walk out of the theater glad to be a human being and you say to yourself I hope they make a lot of money from that? I hope the actors, I hope the director earns a million dollars for what they’ve done, what they’ve given me tonight? And you go back and see the movie again and you’re happy to be a tiny part of the system that is rewarding those people with every ticket...the actors I see on the screen, they’ll get twenty cents of this very dollar I’m paying now; they’ll be able to buy an ice cream cone any flavor they want from their share of my ticket alone. Glorious moments in art in books and films and dance, they’re delicious because we see ourselves in glory’s mirror.”
― Richard Bach, The Bridge Across Forever: A True Love Story
“Fear not, nor be dismayed at the appearance that is darkness, at the disguise that is evil, at the empty cloak that is death, for you have picked these for your challenges. They are stones on which you choose to whet the keen edge of your spirit.”
― Richard Bach, One
“Having made the decision to love, had I chosen life instead of death?”
― Richard Bach, The Bridge Across Forever: A True Love Story
“Real love stories never have endings.”
― Richard Bach
“Don’t believe what your eyes are telling you. All they show is limitation. Look with your understanding.”
― Richard Bach
“He spoke of very simple things- that it is right for a gull to fly, that freedom is the very nature of his being, that whatever stands against that freedom must be set aside, be it ritual or superstition or limitation in any form.
"Set aside," came a voice from the multitude, "even if it be the Law of the Flock?"
"The only true law is that which leads to freedom," Jonathan said. "There is no other.”
― Richard Bach, Jonathan Livingston Seagull
“Live never to be ashamed if anything you do or say is published around the world -- even if what is published is not true.”
― Richard Bach, Illusions: The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah
“Anything we need to know, we can learn it from a book. Reading, careful study, a little practice, and we’re throwing knives expertly, overhauling engines, speaking Esperanto like natives.”
― Richard Bach, The Bridge Across Forever: A True Love Story
“Why had such a promising world been crucified on the tree of obligation, thorned by duties, hanged by hypocrisy, smothered by customs?”
― Richard Bach, The Bridge Across Forever: A True Love Story
“What a delighted fascination it is, to stand aside and watch our dearest friend perform on stage without us.”
― Richard Bach, The Bridge Across Forever: A True Love Story
“One challenge of our adventure on earth is to rise above dead systems...wars, nations, destructions...to refuse to be a part of them, and express the highest selves we know how to be.”
― Richard Bach, One
“Happiness is the reward we get for living to the highest right we know.”
― Richard Bach, Running from Safety: An Adventure of the Spirit
“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 alhatross? 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, Jonathan Livingston Seagull
“You are never given a wish without what it takes to make it true.”
― Richard Bach
“Why? What is so wonderful about mass murder that nobody in the history of the world has ever fond any smarter solution to problems than killing everybody who doesn’t agree? Is that the limit of human intelligence?”
― Richard Bach, One
“Amazing. You were so attached to it, and it still disappeared for you."
“Attached! I was whocking that cloud with everything I had! Fireballs, laser beams, vacuum cleaner a block high...”
“Negative attachments, Richard. If you really want to remove a cloud from your life, you do not make a big production out of it, you just relax and remove it from your thinking. That’s all there is to it.”
― Richard Bach, Illusions: The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah
“This is a test to see if your mission in this life is complete, if you are alive, it isn't.”
― Richard Bach, Illusions: The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah
“You don’t want a million answers as much as you want a few forever questions. The questions are diamonds you hold in the light. Study a lifetime and you see different colors from the same jewel. The same questions, asked again, bring you just the answers you need just the minute you need them.”
― Richard Bach, Running from Safety: An Adventure of the Spirit
“You seek problems because you need their gifts.”
― Richard Bach, Illusions: The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah
“How easy it is to be compassionate when it's yourself you see in trouble.”
― Richard Bach, Illusions: The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah
“All the people, all the events in your life are put there for a reason. What you choose to do with them is up to you”
― Richard Bach
“Every gift from a friend is a wish for your happiness.”
― Richard Bach
“The more I want to get something done the less I call it work.”
― Richard Bach
“It is by not always thinking of yourself, if you can manage it, that you might somehow be happy. Until you can make room in your life for someone as important to you as yourself, you will always be searching and lost....”
― Richard Bach
“Instead of our drab slogging forth and back to the fishing boats, there's reason to live!
We can lift ourselves out of ignorance, we can find ourselves as creatures of excellence and intelligence and skill. We can learn to be free! we can learn to fly!”
― Richard Bach, Jonathan Livingston Seagull
“It's like, at the end, there's this surprise quiz: Am I proud of me? I gave my life to become the person I am right now. Was it worth what I paid?”
― Richard Bach
“And behind it lies not blind chance but a principle that works to help us understand, a thousand "coincidences" and friends come to show us the way when the problem seems too hard to solve alone. Problems for overcoming. Freedom for proving. And, as long as we believe in our dream, nothing by chance.”
― Richard Bach, Nothing by Chance
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