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If you'd learn patience superfine, go you to fish with rod and line.

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Aug 08, 2026

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About Richard David Bach

Richard David Bach

Richard David Bach
(1936- ) Thoughts of Richard Bach, The Bridge Across Forever - US author; wrote Jonathan Livingston Seagull, Illusions and others.

Popular Richard David Bach Quotes

The mark of your ignorance is the depth of your belief in injustice and tragedy.

Argue for your limitations, and sure enough, they're yours.

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.

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

The more I want to get something done, the less I call it work.

You are never given a wish without also being given the power to make it come true. You may have to work for it, however.

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.

Jonathan Livingston Seagull is speaking to his young fledgling son who is learning to fly: You will begin to touch heaven ... 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.... To fly as fast as thought, to anywhere that is, you must begin by knowing that you have already arrived.... The trick is to stop seeing yourself as trapped inside a limited body that has a forty-two-inch wingspan and performance that could be plotted on a chart. The trick is to know that your true nature lives, as perfect as an unwritten number, everywhere at once across space and time.

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. Its only job is to sit there on our shoulder and pass judgment on whether we are worthwhile human beings.

You teach best what you most need to learn.

Just be who you are, calm and clear and bright. Automatically, as we shine who we are, asking ourselves every minute is this what I really want to do, doing it only when we answer yes, automatically that turns away those who have nothing to learn from who we are and attracts those who do, and from whom we have to learn, as well.

The first prerequisite of an advanced being is a sense of humor.

What a story that would make! How many men and women go through the same rivers, menaced by the same sharp clichés, the same jagged dangers that have threatened us! If the idea stands up, I thought, it would be worth uncovering the typewriter! How Richard-years-ago would have wanted to know: What happens when we set off searching for a soulmate who doesn't exist, and find her?

In order to live free and happily you must sacrifice boredom. It is not always an easy sacrifice.

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.

There is no such thing as a problem without a gift for you in its hands. You seek problems because you need their gifts.

Sooner I'd try to change history than turn political, than try convincing others to write letters or to vote or to march or to do something they didn't already feel like doing.

... there is such a thing as perfection ... and our purpose for living is to find that perfection and show it forth....

Not being known doesn't stop the truth from being true.

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.

The ideas behind the words are simple ones that work in everyday life; find what we most want to do; do it, no matter what; and in the doing be guaranteed a very difficult and a very happy lifetime.

Here is a test to find whether your mission on earth is finished: If you’re alive, it isn’t.

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.

It is by not always thinking of yourself, if you can manage it, that you might somehow be happy. Until you make room in your life for someone as important to you as yourself, you will always be searching and lost ...

'Do you know what I learned from you? I learned what is possible, and now I must hold out for what I thought we had. I want to be very close to someone I respect and admire and have somebody who feels the same way about me. That or nothing. I realized that what I'm looking for is not what you're looking for. You don't want what I want.' 'What do you think I want?' I asked. 'Exactly what you have. Many women you know a little and don't care very much about. Superficial flirtations, mutual use, no chance of love. That's my idea of hell. Hell is a place, a time, a consciousness, Richard, in which there is no love. Horrible! Leave me out of it.'

For a moment, off balance, was I annoyed? Anger is always fear, I thought, and fear is always fear of loss. Would I lose myself if he made those choices? It took a second to settle down: I'd lose nothing. They'd be his wishes, not mine, and he's free to live as he wants. The loss would come if I dared force him, tried to live for him and me as well. There'd be disaster worse than life on a bar stool.

The conversation between Fletcher and Jonathan Livingston Seagull is centered on why some have achieved more than others ... are they divine ... ahead of their times ... Fletcher says, Well, this kind of flying has always been here to be learned by anybody who wanted to discover it; that’s got nothing to do with time. We’re ahead of the fashion, maybe. Ahead of the way most gulls fly. Poor Fletch. Don’t you believe what your eyes are telling you? All they show is limitations. Look with your understanding, find out what you already know, and you’ll see the way to fly.

If we must lose wife or husband when we live to our highest right, we lose an unhappy marriage as well, and we gain ourselves. But if a marriage is born between two already self-discovered, what a lovely adventure begins, hurricanes and all!

Live never to be ashamed if anything you do or say is published around the world — even if what is published is not true.

Argue for your limitations and they're yours.

Life does not require us to be consistent, cruel, patient, helpful, angry, rational, thoughtless, loving, rash, open-minded, neurotic, careful, rigid, tolerant, wasteful, rich, downtrodden, gentle, sick, considerate, funny, stupid, healthy, greedy, beautiful, lazy, responsive, foolish, sharing, pressured, intimate, hedonistic, industrious, manipulative, insightful, capricious, wise, selfish, kind or sacrificed. Life does, however, require us to live with the consequences of our choices.

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.

Learning is finding out what you already know. Doing is demonstrating that you know it. Teaching is reminding others that they know it just as well as you. You are all learners, doers, teachers.

Two things I do value a lot, intimacy and the capacity for joy, didn't seem to be on anyone else's list. I felt like the stranger in a strange land, and decided I'd better not marry the natives.

What if somebody came along who could teach me how my world works and how to control it? What if I could meet a super-advanced ... what if a Siddhartha or a Jesus came into our time, with power over the illusions of the world because he knew the reality behind them? And what if I could meet him in person, if he were flying a biplane, for instance, and landed in the same meadow with me?

Good and evil are not what our parents told us, not what our church tells us, or our country, not what anybody else tells us! All of us decide good and evil for ourselves, automatically, by choosing what we want to do!

That she won the game startled me cold. The way she won, the pattern of her thought on the chessboard, charmed me warm again and then some.

Your friends will know you better in the first minute you meet than your acquaintances will know you in a thousand years.

Each of us is in truth an unlimited idea of freedom. Everything that limits us we have to put aside.

What was the question? ... Oh. Where do I get my crazy ideas? Answer: sleep-fairy, walk-fairy, shower-fairy. Book-fairy. And in these last few years, from my wife. Now when I have questions I ask her and she tells me the answer. If you haven't already, I'd suggest you want to find your soulmate, as soon as you can. Next question?'

She didn't mean to be sexy that moment, but even a winter nightgown couldn't hide that lovely outline. When will I outgrow my simple-minded fascination with the form she had happened to choose for her body? Never, I thought

If we change in different directions, then we don't have any future anyway, do we? I think it's possible for two people to change together, to grow together and enrich instead of diminish each other. The sum of one and one, if they're the right ones, can be infinity! But so often one person drags the other down; one person wants to go up like a balloon and the other's a dead weight. I've always wondered what it would be like if both people, if a woman and a man both wanted to go up like balloons!

We're different, we're the same. You thought you'd never find a word to say to a woman who didn't fly airplanes. I couldn't imagine myself spending time with a man who didn't love music. Could it be it's not as important to be alike as it is to be curious? Because we're different, we can have the fun of exchanging worlds, giving our loves and excitements to each other. You can learn music, I can learn flying. And that's only the beginning. I think it would go on for us as long as we live.

The world's crazy, when it comes to beauty.

Here's how the people live here, in big house-shaped boxes to keep off 'rain' and 'snow,' holes cut in the sides so they can see out. They move around in smaller boxes, painted different colours, with wheels on the corners. They need this box-culture because each person thinks of herself and himself as locked in a box called a 'body,' arms and legs, fingers to move pencils and tools, languages because they've forgotten how to communicate, eyes because they've forgotten how to see. Odd little planet. Wish you were here. Home soon.

You have the freedom to be yourself, your true self, here and now, and nothing can stand in your way.

Other people think they know what you are: glamour, sex, money, power, love. It may be a press agent dream which has nothing to do with you, maybe it's something you don't even like, but that's what they think you are. People rush at you from all sides, they think they're going to get these things if they touch you. It's scary, so you build walls around yourself, thick glass walls while you're trying to think, trying to catch your breath. You know who you are inside, but people outside see something different. You can choose to become the image, and let go of who you are, or continue as you are and feel phony when you play the image.

Your only obligation in any lifetime is to be true to yourself. Being true to anyone else or anything else is ... impossible.

Respect for sovereignity, for privacy, for total independence. Gentle alliances against loneliness, they were, cool rational love-affairs without the love.

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