“Ever since I was a little boy, I dreamed I would do something important in aviation.”

The single thing which makes any man happiest is the realization that he has worked up to the limits of his ability, his capacity. It’s all the better, of course, if this work has made a contribution to knowledge, or toward moving the human race a little farther forward.

I think if there was anything I learned from our skipper was that it’s not how you look; it’s how you perform.

People love conspiracy theories.

Gliders, sail planes, they’re wonderful flying machines. It’s the closest you can come to being a bird.

I believe that the message of Apollo XI was that in the spirit of Apollo, a free and open spirit, you can attack a very difficult goal and achieve it, if you can all agree and work together to achieve that goal.

Houston, Tranquillity Base here. The Eagle has landed.

In much of society, research means to investigate something you do not know or understand.

A picture does a great job, but it’s not nearly like being there.

This blowing dust became increasingly thicker. It was very much like landing in a fast moving ground fog.

I only go in a small fraction of an inch, maybe an eighth of an inch, but I can see the footprints of my boots and the treads in the fine sandy particles.

You’ve got to expect things are going to go wrong. And we always need to prepare ourselves for handling the unexpected.

The regret on our side is, they used to say years ago, we are reading about you in science class. Now they say, we are reading about you in history class.

It suddenly struck me that that tiny pea, pretty and blue, was the Earth. I put up my thumb and shut one eye, and my thumb blotted out the planet Earth. I didn’t feel like a giant. I felt very, very small.

Geologists have a saying – rocks remember.

Space has not changed but technology has, in many cases, improved dramatically.

It’s a great thing for a man to walk on the moon. But it’s a greater thing for God to walk on the earth.

A man is never completely alone in this world. At the worst, he has the company of a boy, a youth, and by and by a grown man – the one he used to be.

For before this I was born once a boy, and a maiden, and a plant, and a bird, and a darting fish in the sea.

Boys with skeletons in their closets – they make skeletons out of girls.

A boy has to peddle his book.

I am asking a boy to do a man’s job and love me.

I was dreaming about my grandfather. A very old man, at least as old as I am now, 91. I thought, when I was a boy, that he had been 91 all his life. Now I feel as if I have been 91 all my life.

The frailty of everything revealed at last. Old and troubling issues resolved into nothingness and night. The last instance of a thing takes the class with it. Turns out the light and is gone. Look around you. Ever is a long time. But the boy knew what he knew. That ever is no time at all.

Men wear hearts on the sleeves that boys wipe their noses on.