81+ Charles Lindbergh Quotes

Charles Lindbergh was a military officer and American aviator, who later became an author, inventor, and activist.

Charles Lindbergh got famous overnight when he made the first nonstop flight from New York City to Paris. He achieved this feat in 1927 when he was only 25.

Charles Lindbergh understood the true essence of life, which is why his quotes mostly talk about living in the moment and amidst nature. So, remembering the legend, let us go through his quotes so that we can strive toward living a better life.

Let us see what American aviator and military officer, Charles Lindbergh, had to say about flying.

"Pilots are drawn to flying because it’s a perfect combination of science, romance and adventure."

"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."

"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?"

"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 ."

"I'm not sure I like the idea of millions of planes flying around overhead. I love the sky's unbroken solitude."

"I believe the risks I take are justified by the sheer love of the life I lead."

"I have seen the science I worshiped, and the aircraft I loved, destroying the civilization I expected them to serve."

"Every aviator knows that if mechanics are inaccurate, aircraft crash. If pilots are inaccurate, they get lost - sometimes killed. In my profession life itself depends on accuracy."

"If I had to choose, I would rather have birds than airplanes."

"If one took no chances, one would not fly at all. Safety lies in the judgment of the chances one takes."

"There's one thing I wish to get straight about this flight. They call me "Lucky," but luck isn't enough."

"Aviation seems almost a gift from heaven to those Western nations who were already the leaders of their era, strengthening their leadership, their confidence, their dominance over other peoples."

"When I was a student in college, just flying an airplane seemed a dream. But that dream turned into reality."

"I was astonished at the effect my successful landing in France had on the nations of the world. To me, it was like a match lighting a bonfire."

"Flying has torn apart the relationship of space and time: it uses our old clock but with new yardsticks."

"Science, freedom, beauty, adventure: what more could you ask of life? Aviation combined all the elements I loved."

"I realized that the future of aviation, to which I had devoted so much of my life, depended less on the perfection of aircraft than on preserving the epoch-evolved environment of life, and that this was true of all technological progress."

"What pilot has not been in positions where he was in danger and where perfect judgment would have advised against going?"

"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."

"Alone? With what other companions would man fly to whom the choice were given?"

"Any coward can sit in his home and criticize a pilot for flying into a mountain in a fog. But I would rather, by far, die on a mountainside than in bed."

"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."

"What kind of man would live where there is no daring? And is life so dear that we should blame men for dying in adventure? Is there a better way to die?"

"Aviation brings a new concept of time and distance to the affairs of men."

"At first you can stand the spotlight in your eyes. Then it blinds you. Others can see you, but you cannot see them."

These Charles Lindbergh quotes will inspire you to achieve success.

(Charles Lindbergh attested to the fact that imagination is key to living a worthwhile and meaningful life. )

"Decades spent in contact with science and its vehicles have directed my mind and senses to areas beyond their reach."

"I now see scientific accomplishments as a path, not an end; a path leading to and disappearing in mystery."

"Success is not measured by what a man accomplishes, but by the opposition he has encountered and the courage with which he has maintained the struggle against overwhelming odds."

"I believe that for permanent survival, man must balance science with other qualities of life, qualities of body and spirit as well as those of mind - qualities he cannot develop when he lets mechanics and luxury insulate him too greatly from the earth to which he was born.

"I learned that danger is relative, and the inexperience can be a magnifying glass."

"Whatever a man imagines he can attain, if he doesn’t become too arrogant and encroach on the rights of the gods."

"In wilderness I sense miracle of life, and behind it our scientific accomplishments fade to trivia."

"I don't believe in taking foolish chances, but nothing can be accomplished if we don't take any chances at all."

"Ideas are like seeds, apparently insignificant when first held in the hand. Once firmly planted, they can grow and flower into almost anything at all, a cornstalk, or a giant redwood, or a flight across the ocean."

"Whatever a man imagines, he can achieve."

"Living in dreams of yesterday, we find ourselves still dreaming of impossible future conquests."

"Man has risen so far above all other species that he competes in ways unique in nature. He fights by means of complicated weapons; he fights for ends remote in time."

Charles Lindbergh's opinions on freedom are beautifully expressed in these quotes.

"Man must feel the earth to know himself and recognize his values... God made life simple. It is man who complicates it."

"As civilization advances, man grows unconscious of the primitive elements of life; he is separated from them by his perfection of material techniques."

"I grow aware of various forms of man and of myself. I am form and I am formless, I am life and I am matter, mortal and immortal. I am one and many - myself and humanity in flux."

"Is he alone who has courage on his right hand and faith on his left hand?"

"We are in the grip of a scientific materialism, caught in a vicious cycle where our security today seems to depend on regimentation and weapons which will ruin us tomorrow."

"Man is a mixture of desires that extend beyond his knowledge and often result in action conflicting with rationality."

"Real freedom lies in wildness, not civilization."

"It is always easier to deal in truth and honesty and follow these to their legitimate ends, than it is to construct and adjust a false superstructure upon a false base."

"And if at times you renounce experience and mind's heavy logic, it seems that the world has rushed along on its orbit, leaving you alone flying above a forgotten cloud bank, somewhere in the solitude of interstellar space."

"Here was a place where men and life and death had reached the lowest form of degradation. How could any reward in national progress even faintly justify the establishment and operation of such a place?"

"I know myself as mortal, but this raises the question: "What is I?" Am I an individual, or am I an evolving life stream composed of countless selves?"

"Consciousness grows independent of the ordinary senses."

“Isn’t it strange that we talk least about the things we think about most!”

"We cannot allow the natural passions and prejudices of other peoples to lead our country to destruction."

"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."

"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 explains how beautiful life is through his quotes.

"Time is no longer endless or the horizon destitute of hope."

"This is earth again, the earth where I've lived and now will live once more... I've been to eternity and back. I know how the dead would feel to live again."

"There is in wildness a natural wisdom that shapes all Earth's experiments with life."

"Life - a culmination of the past, an awareness of the present, an indication of a future beyond knowledge, the quality that gives a touch of divinity to matter."

"Without death there would be no awareness of life, and the recurring selection and renewal that has caused life's progress would be ended."

"I must teach my children to know and to love the earth itself. If they can keep in contact with the land and the water and the sky, they can obtain all worthwhile that life holds."

"Molecular and atomic replacement change life's composition. Molecules take part in structure and in training, countless trillions of them. After my death, the molecules of my being will return to the earth and sky. They came from the stars. I am of the stars."

"Who is man to say that the workings of nature, and therefore of the divine plan of which he himself is part, are cruel?"

"Why should anyone think a white skin superior in evaluating the qualities of human life? I did not really admire a white skin so much myself. Did I not prefer the brown skin that came with exposure to the sun?"

"Whether outwardly or inwardly, whether in space or time, the farther we penetrate the unknown, the vaster and more marvelous it becomes."

"Life's values originate in circumstances over which the individual has no control."

"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."

"We can so reconstruct society that it will be self-perpetuating instead of as now, self-exhaustive."

"To a person in love, the value of the individual is intuitively known. Love needs no logic for its mission."

"From now on, depressions will be scientifically created."

"I live only in the moment in this strange unmortal space, crowded with beauty, pierced with danger."

"A great industrial nation may conquer the world in the span of a single life, but its Achilles' heel is time. Its children, what of them?"

"Life is like a landscape. You live in the midst of it but can describe it only from the vantage point of distance."

"It is not the willingness to kill on the part of our soldiers which most concerns me. That is an inherent part of war. It is our lack of respect for even the admirable characteristics of our enemy - for courage, for suffering, for death, for his willingness to die for his beliefs, for his companies and squadrons which go forth, one after another, to annihilation against our superior training and equipment."

"The individual is at the apex of his species' past, at the entrance to its future."

"Isn't it strange that we talk least about the things we think about most?"

"I would rather live one day in Maui than one month in New York."

"The present panic is the first scientifically created one, worked out as we figured, a mathematical equation."

"Of course there's danger; but a certain amount of danger is essential to the quality of life."

"Is civilization progress?"

"Awareness requires the interplay of every faculty, the use of your entire being as an eye."