Aviator Quotes

“Nobody grasped you by the shoulder while there was still time. Now the clay of which you were shaped has dried and hardened, and naught in you will ever awaken the sleeping musician, the poet, the asronomer that possibly inhabited you in the beginning.”

“If it is true that wars are won by believers, it is also true that peace treaties are sometimes signed by businessmen.”

“Behind all seen things lies something vaster; everything is but a path, a portal or a window opening on something other than iteself.”

“I saw the sunset forty-four times!”

“An administration, like a machine, does not create. It carries on.”

“We are forever responsible for that which we have tamed.”

“There is no growth except in the fulfillment of obligations.”

“When someone blushes, doesn't that mean 'yes'?”

“The wind in the grain is the caress to the spouse; it is the hand of peace stroking her hair.”

“Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.”

“But the conceited man did not hear him. Conceited people never hear anything but praise.”

“Love, like a carefully loaded ship, crosses the gulf between the generations.”

“I am who I am and I have the need to be.”

“The job has its grandeurs, yes. There is the exultation of arriving safely after a storm, the joy of gliding down out of the darkness of night or tempest toward a sun-drenched Alicante or Santiago; there is the swelling sense of returning to repossess one's place in life, in the miraculous garden of earth, where are trees and women and, down by the harbor, friendly little bars. When he has throttled his engine and is banking into the airport, leaving the somber cloud masses behind, what pilot does not break into song?”

“A civilization is a heritage of beliefs, customs, and knowledge slowly accumulated in the course of centuries, elements difficult at times to justify by logic, but justifying themselves as paths when they lead somewhere, since they open up for man his inner distance.”

“Only the children know what they are looking for. They waste their time over a rag doll and it becomes very important to them; and if anybody takes it away from them, they cry.”

“Love does not consist in gazing at each other, but in looking outward together in the same direction.”

“But eyes are blind. You have to look with the heart.”

“There is no hope of joy except in human relations.”

“A man's age is something impressive, it sums up his life: maturity reached slowly and against many obstacles, illnesses cured, griefs and despairs overcome, and unconscious risks taken; maturity formed through so many desires, hopes, regrets, forgotten things, loves. A man's age represents a fine cargo of experience and memories.”

“Let a man in a garret but burn with enough intensity and he will set fire to the world.”

“Commonly, people believe that defeat is characterized by a general bustle and a feverish rush. Bustle and rush are the signs of victory, not of defeat. Victory is a thing of action. It is a house in the act of being built. Every participant in victory sweats and puffs, carrying the stones for the building of the house. But defeat is a thing of weariness, of incoherence, of boredom. And above all of futility.”

“He who is different from me does not impoverish me - he enriches me. Our unity is constituted in something higher than ourselves - in Man... For no man seeks to hear his own echo, or to find his reflection in the glass.”

“On a day of burial there is no perspective--for space itself is annihilated. Your dead friend is still a fragmentary being. The day you bury him is a day of chores and crowds, of hands false or true to be shaken, of the immediate cares of mourning. The dead friend will not really die until tomorrow, when silence is round you again. Then he will show himself complete, as he was--to tear himself away, as he was, from the substantial you. Only then will you cry out because of him who is leaving and whom you cannot detain.”

“The meaning of things lies not in the things themselves, but in our attitude towards them.”