Wright Brothers Quotes

“Thousands of men had thought about flying machines and a few had even built machines which they called flying machines, but these were guilty of almost everything except flying.”

“What is chiefly needed is skill rather than machinery.”

“After these years of experience I look with amazement upon our audacity in attempting flights with a new and untried machine under such circumstances.”

“It is possible to fly without motors, but not without knowledge and skill.”

“If we worked on the assumption that what is accepted as true really is true, then there would be little hope for advance.”

“Man, by reason of his greater intellect, can more reasonably hope to equal birds in knowledge than to equal nature in the perfection of her machinery.”

“There is no sport equal to that which aviators enjoy while being carried through the air on great white wings. More than anything else the sensation is one of perfect peace mingled with an excitement that strains every nerve to the utmost if you can conceive of such a combination.”

“Do not let yourself be forced into doing anything before you are ready.”

“Isn’t it astonishing that all these secrets have been preserved for so many years just so we could discover them!”

“My brother and I became seriously interested in the problem of human flight in 1899 ... We knew that men had by common consent adopted human flight as the standard of impossibility. When a man said, “It can’t be done; a man might as well try to fly,” he was understood as expressing the final limit of impossibility.”

“Our own growing belief that man might nevertheless learn to fly was based on the idea that while thousands of the most dissimilar body structures, such as insects, fish, reptiles, birds and mammals, were flying every day at pleasure, it was reasonable to suppose that man might also fly.”

“The desire to fly is an idea handed down to us by our ancestors who, in their grueling travels across trackless lands in prehistoric times, looked enviously on the birds soaring freely through space, at full speed, above all obstacles, on the infinite highway of the air.”

“With all the knowledge and skill acquired in thousands of flights in the last ten years, I would hardly think today of making my first flight on a strange machine in a twenty-seven mile wind, even if I knew that the machine had already been flown and was safe.”

“The exhilaration of flying is too keen, the pleasure too great, for it to be neglected as a sport.”

“For some years I have been afflicted with the belief that flight is possible to man. My disease has increased in severity and I feel that it will soon cost me an increased amount of money if not my life.”

“We were lucky enough to grow up in an environment where there was always much encouragement to children to pursue intellectual interests; to investigate whatever aroused curiosity.”

“If birds can glide for long periods of time, then… why can’t I?”

“The airplane stays up because it doesn’t have the time to fall.”

“We figured that Lilienthal in five years of time had spent only about five hours in actual gliding through the air. The wonder was not that he had done so little, but that he had accomplished so much.

“What one man can do himself directly is but little. If however he can stir up ten others to take up the task he has accomplished much.”