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When once you have tasted flight, you will forever walk the Earth with your Eyes Turned Skyward, for there you have been, and there you will always long to return.
It’s a famous line, seen often online and in print. It’s almost always in quotation marks, and it’s almost always attributed to Leonardo da Vinci. But that is wrong. How could Leonardo (1452 - 1519) taste flight? My 2020 article in Air Facts details the origin of the phrase and its actual auther: The Famous Quote That Da Vinci Never Said.
But this “quotation” holds a strong appeal to our psyche, maybe because many of us have our eyes, minds and hearts turned upward to space. So it’s my title here on the internet. A place where astronomers and astronauts, dreamers and doers, share with us their best thoughts on space. And it’s also a constant reminder to me to be as accurate as I can in recording original source information.
There are so many popular space quotes that are not actually true that my August 2012 article for Sky & Telescope magazine on misquotes ran to six pages! Those ones and more are collected here in the Myths and Misquotes page.
The collection started as a section of my Great Aviation Quotes webpage, and has slowly grown. Now it’s blasting upwards on Facebook and BlueSky. It’s pretty neat to think who could be reading these collected thoughts:
I’m sure we would not have had men on the Moon if it had not been for Wells and Verne and the people who write about this and made people think about it. I’m rather proud of the fact that I know several astronauts who became astronauts through reading my books.
Arthur C. Clarke
The View from Serendip, 1977.
I find that words are magical in their ability to capture emotion and convey information.
Buzz Aldrin
23 October 2005, in the 2017 book The World is Just a Book Away.
A book, too, can be a star, “explosive material, capable of stirring up fresh life endlessly,” a living fire to lighten the darkness, leading out into the expanding universe.
Madeleine L’Engle
Newbery Award Acceptance Speech: The Expanding Universe, August 1963.
What an astonishing thing a book is. It’s a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you’re inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic.
Carl Sagan
Cosmos: A Personal Voyage, Episode 11, The Persistence of Memory, 1980.
