Richard Bach
American author.
The things we own, the places we live, the events of our lives: empty settings. How easy to chase after settings, and forget diamonds! The only thing that matters, at the end of a stay on earth, is how well did we love, what was the quality of our love?
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.
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.
You're going to die a horrible death, remember. It's all good training, and you'll enjoy it more if you keep the facts in mind.
Take your dying with some seriousness, however. Laughing on the way to your execution is not generally understood by less advanced lifeforms, and they'll call you crazy.
The opposite of loneliness, it's not togetherness. It is intimacy.
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 awhile, and watch your answers change.
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.
Imagine the universe beautiful and just and perfect.
Then be sure of one thing:
The Is has imagined it quite a bit better than you have.
We're all the sons of God, or children of the Is, or ideas of the Mind, or however else you want to say it.
You teach best what you most need to learn.
Don’t believe what your eyes are telling you. All they show is limitation. Look with your understanding.
You are led through your lifetime by the inner learning creature, the playful spiritual being that is your real self.
Don't turn away from possible futures before you're certain you don't have anything to learn from them.
No one does anything uncharacteristic of who they are.
"The only true law is that which leads to freedom," Jonathan said. "There is no other."
And [the Messiah] said unto them, "If a man told God that he wanted most of all to help the suffering world, no matter the price to himself, and God answered and told him what he must do, should the man do as he is told?"
Your only obligation in any lifetime is to be true to yourself. Being true to anyone else or anything else is not only impossible, but the mark of a fake messiah.
For most gulls, it is not flying that matters, but eating. For this gull, though, it was not eating that mattered, but flight.
Your friends will know you better in the first minute you meet than your acquaintances will know you in a thousand years.
But the speed was power, and the speed was joy, and the speed was pure beauty.
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.