Jonathan Livingston Seagull Quotes

“The trick was to know that his true nature lived, as perfect as an unwritten number, everywhere at once across space and time.”

“For in spite of his lonely past, Jonathan Seagull was born to be an instructor, and his own way of demonstrating love was to give something of the truth that he had seen to a gull who asked only a chance to see truth for himself.”

“Don’t believe what your eyes are telling you. All they show is limitation.”

“For a long time Jonathan forgot about the world that he had come from, that place where the Flock lived with its eyes tightly shut to the joy of flight, using its wings as means to the end of finding and fighting for food. But now and then, just for a moment, he remembered.”

“You will begin to touch heaven, Jonathan, in the moment that you touch the perfect speed. And it isn’t flying a thousand miles an hour, or a million, or flying at the speed of light. Because any number is a limit, and perfection doesn’t have limits. Perfect speed, my son, is being there.”

“The gull sees farthest who flies highest.”

“Seagulls, as you know, never falter, never stall. To stall in the air is for them disgrace and it is dishonor. But Jonathan Livingston Seagull, unashamed, stretching his wings again in that trembling hard curve–slowing, slowing, and stalling once more–was no ordinary bird.”

“By morning the Flock had forgotten its insanity, but Fletcher had not. ‘Jonathan, remember what you said a long time ago, about loving the Flock enough to return to it and help it learn?’ ‘Sure.’ ‘I don’t understand how you manage to love a mob of birds that has just tried to kill you.’ ‘Oh, Fletch, you don’t love that! You don’t love hatred and evil, of course. You have to practice and see the real gull, the good in every one of them, and to help them see it in themselves. That’s what I mean by love. It’s fun, when you get the knack of it.’”

“Look with your understanding, find out what you already know, and you’ll see the way to fly.”

“And though he tried to look properly severe for his students, Fletcher Seagull suddenly saw them all as they really were, just for a moment, and he more than liked, he loved what it was he saw.”

“Instead of being enfeebled by age, the Elder had been empowered by it; He could outfly any gull in the Flock, and he had learned skills that the others were only gradually coming to know.”

“Heaven is not a place, and it is not a time. Heaven is being perfect.”

“Look at Fletcher! Lowell! Charles-Roland! Judy Lee! Are they also special and gifted and divine? No more than you are, no more than I am. The only difference, the very only one, is that they have begun to understand what they really are and have begun to practice it.”

“‘The only true law is that which leads to freedom,’ Jonathan said. ‘There is no other.’”

“His one sorrow was not solitude, it was that the other gulls refused to believe the glory of flight that awaited them; they refused to open their eyes and see.”

“’Why is it,’ Jonathan puzzled, ‘that the hardest thing in the world is to convince a bird that he is free, and that he can prove it for himself if he’d just spend a little time practicing? Why should that be so hard?’”

“He spoke of very simple things–It is right for a gull to fly, that freedom is the very nature of his being, that whatever stands against that freedom must be set aside, be it ritual or superstition out limitation in any form.”

“We choose our next world through what we learn in this one. Learn nothing, and the next world is the same as this one, all the same limitations and lead weights to overcome.”

“A mile from shore a fishing boat chummed the water, and the word for Breakfast Flock flashed through the air, till a crowd of a thousand seagulls came to dodge and fight for bits of food. It was another busy day beginning. But way off alone, out by himself beyond boat and shore, Jonathan Livingston Seagull was practicing.”

“Most gulls don’t bother to learn more than the simplest facts of flights–how to get from shore to food and back again. For most gulls, it is not flying that matters, but eating. For this gull, though, it was not eating that mattered, but flight. More than anything else, Jonathan Livingston Seagull loved to fly.”