40 quotes
My aging body transmits an ageless life stream.
Autobiography of Values (1978)
What the German has done to the Jew in Europe, we are doing to the Jap in the Pacific.
In primitive rather than in civilized surroundings I grow aware of man's evolving status, as though I were suddenly released from a hypnotic state. Life itself becomes the standard of all judgement.
What kind of man would live where there is no danger? I don't believe in taking foolish chances. But nothing can be accomplished by not taking a chance at all.
Lindbergh: Flight's Enigmatic Hero (2002)
Man must feel the earth to know himself and recognize his values... God made life simple. It is man who complicates it.
As Earth's most messy, destructive and defective animal, man's record gives him little cause for pride. Our present intellectual superiority is no guarantee of great wisdom or survival power in our genes.
In civilization's sky-scraping cities I feel my superiority to lower animals confirmed by man's unchallenged rule. I view other creatures with a god's aloofness; for I have intellect, and they, no more than instinct.
Living in dreams of yesterday, we find ourselves still dreaming of impossible future conquest...
Lindbergh (1998)
Charles is life itself — pure life, force, like sunlight — and it is for this that I married him and this that holds me to him — caring always, caring desperately what happens to him and whatever he happens to be involved in.
Flow followed fall, and fall followed flow as I descended the mountainside. The river was mortal and immortal as life, as becoming.
Autobiography of Values (1978)
The readiness to blame a dead pilot for an accident is nauseating, but it has been the tendency ever since I can remember. What pilot has not been in positions where he was in danger and where perfect judgment would have advised against going?
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?
Autobiography of Values (1978)
How long can men thrive between walls of brick, walking on asphalt pavements, breathing the fumes of coal and of oil, growing, working, dying, with hardly a thought of wind, and sky, and fields of grain, seeing only machine-made beauty, the mineral-like quality of life.
Aviation, Geography, and Race (1939)
Shall we now give up the independence we have won, and crusade abroad in a utopian attempt to force our ideas on the rest of the world; or shall we use air power, and the other advances of modern warfare, to guard and strengthen the independence of our nation?
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.
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.
Autobiography of Values (1978)
The growing knowledge of science does not refute man's intuition of the mystical. Whether outwardly or inwardly, whether in space or in time, the farther we penetrate the unknown, the vaster and more marvelous it becomes.
Autobiography of Values (1978)
I recall standing on the edge of a deep valley in the Hawaiian island of Maui, thinking that the life stream is like a mountain river — springing from hidden sources, born out of the earth, touched by stars, merging, blending, evolving in the shape momentarily seen.
Autobiography of Values (1978)
Aviation has struck a delicately balanced world, a world where stability was already giving way to the pressure of new dynamic forces, a world dominated by a mechanical, materialist, Western European civilization.
Aviation, Geography, and Race (1939)
It was a love of the air and sky and flying, the lure of adventure, the appreciation of beauty. It lay beyond the descriptive words of men — where immortality is touched through danger, where life meets death on equal plane; where man is more than man, and existence both supreme and valueless at the same time.
Thoughts on his first parachute jump in The Spirit of St Louis (1953)