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Your Quotes for 4 February 2006 - Charles Lindbergh

Charles Augustus Lindbergh was born at Detroit, Michigan on this day in 1902. He grew up on a Minnesota farm, dropped out of the University of Wisconsin to work in an aircraft factory. He first flew in 1922, and bought his own first plane in 1923. He did some barnstorming, delivered mail, and took a commission in the Reserves. Like many others, including four who died trying, he was challenged by the $25,000 prize for the first pilot to fly from Long Island, New York to Paris. He raised money from Saint Louis businesses and commissioned "The Spirit of Saint Louis" from the Ryan Airlines Company of San Diego. Before the flight, newspapers called him "the flying fool." When he returned he was known as "Lucky Lindy" and the "Lone Eagle."

Any coward can sit in his home and criticize a pilot for flying into a mountain in a fog. But I would rather, by far, die on a mountainside than in bed. What kind of man would live where there is no daring? And is life so dear that we should blame men for dying in adventure? Is there a better way to die?

In wilderness I sense the miracle of life, and behind it our scientific accomplishments fade to trivia.

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.

Life is like a landscape. You live in the midst of it but can describe it only from the vantage point of distance.

I believe that for permanent survival, man must balance science with other qualities of life, qualities of body and spirit as well as those of mind - qualities he cannot develop when he lets mechanics and luxury insulate him too greatly from the earth to which he was born.

Isn't it strange that we talk least about the things we think about most?
     - All from Charles Augustus Lindbergh, 1902 - 1974

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