“When you have flown halfway across a desert, you experience the desperation of a sleepless man waiting for dawn which only comes when the importance of its coming is lost.”

Who thinks it just to be judged by a single error?

That’s what makes death so hard–unsatisfied curiosity

This, I suppose, is why we are so wonderful and can make movies and electric razors and wireless sets – and guns with which to shoot the elephant, the hare, clay pigeons, and each other.

For all professional pilots there exists a kind of guild, without charter and without by-laws. it demands no requirements for inclusion save an understanding of the wind, the compass, the rudder, and fair fellowship.

She has a derelict quality in her character; she toys with freedom and hints at liberation, but yields her own desires gently.

We swung over the hills and over the town and back again, and I saw how a man can be master of a craft, and how a craft can be master of an element. I saw the alchemy of perspective reduce my world, and all my other life, to grains in a cup.

Conformation … but not much else. Breeding, but too small a heart. You saw it everywhere – in men, in horses, and in women.

There are as many Africas as there are books about Africa.

There’s an old adage,” he said, “translated from the ancient Coptic, that contains all the wisdom of the ages — “Life is life and fun is fun, but it’s all so quiet when the goldfish die.

Harmony comes gradually to a pilot and his plane. The wing does not want so much to fly true as to tug at the hands that guide it; the ship would rather hunt the wind than lay her nose to the horizon far ahead.

A lovely horse is always an experience…. It is an emotional experience of the kind that is spoiled by words.

One day the stars will be as familiar to each man as the landmarks, the curves, and the hills on the road that leads to his door, and one day that will be an airborne life.

We fly, but we have not ‘conquered’ the air. Nature presides in all her dignity, permitting us the study and the use of such of her forces as we may understand.

Nature having developed their bodies in one direction and their brains in another, while human beings, on the other hand, drew from Mr. Darwin’s lottery of evolution both the winning ticket and the stub to match it.

[The lion] began to contemplate me with a kind of quiet premeditation, like that of a slow-witted man fondling an unaccustomed thought.

If your hunch proves a good one, you were inspired; if it proves bad, you are guilty of yielding to thoughtless impulse.

What could I dream of that had the barest possibility of coming true?

There are places one comes home to that one has never been to.

The coming of honor or disgrace must be a reflection of one’s inner power.

I am a businessman. This is what I do each and every day. I love it. I love coming to work. I never have a bad day.

What is the world coming to?

One mustn’t close one’s eyes to difficulty and to shortcomings; the more one recognizes them, the less they upset one.

Spending a weekend with Hitler would have been boring in the extreme, although you would have had a greater certainty in coming back alive.

How do the stems connect to the roots?’ ‘Where is the mist coming from?’ ‘Why does one tree seem darker than another?’ These questions are implicitly asked and answered in the process of sketching.