Distilling Sam’s pushpull, sometimes stern, sometimes zany, from-the-cuff, master-to-student method of flight instruction into words is tricky. He was more demonstrate than discuss. But I’ve been slowly connecting dots to see what picture emerges.
The twelve web pages linked here are a good start. Airmanship mindsets that work whatever aircraft we are flying. Because no one is born a good pilot. We are all made. And we can make ourselves better:
Flying alone! Nothing gives such a sense of mastery over mechanism, mastery indeed over space, time, and life itself, as this. Most men covet the power of putting the world, their world, into perspective, of seeing themselves in relation to it, of achieving some sort of harmony with their environment. It involves mastery, for that alone gives detachment, and only from detachment comes harmony.
Cecil Lewis
Flying is part science, part technology, part art, part expression.
Tim Brill
We’ve been running around on the ground for about two million years. We’ve been paddling and sailing on the oceans for 10,000 years, but we’ve been in the air for only about a hundred. The human consciousness about flying in quite limited.
Gavin Willis
To conquer oneself is of all victories the first and best, but to be defeated by oneself is at once the most shameful and worst of all.
Plato
If one really wishes to be master of an art, technical knowledge is not enough. One has to transcend technique so that the art becomes an artless art growing out of the unconscious.
Daisetsu Suzuki
Great pilots are made not born … A man may possess good eyesight, sensitive hands, and perfect coordination, but the end result is only fashioned by steady coaching, much practice, and experience.
J. E. 'Johnnie' Johnson
I don’t believe there is such a thing as a ‘born’ soccer player. Perhaps you are born with certain skills and talents, but quite frankly it seems impossible to me that one is actually born to be an ace soccer player.
Pelé
If you do not conquer self, you will be conquered by self.
Napoleon Hill
As human beings, our greatness lies not so much in being able to remake the world … as in being able to remake ourselves.
Mahatma Gandhi
There’s only one way to succeed in anything, and that is to give it everything. I do, and I demand that my players do.
Vince Lombardi
Extraordinary performance is built on layers of routine training.
Richard McSpadden
A colossal swindle of the 'New Age' movement is the notion that gaining a state of effortless being and doing requires no effort. In fact, great conscious effort, discipline, and patience are normally required to enter the 'flow zone' where previously frightening challenges start taking on an aspect of relaxed ease. The venue does not change. Everest does not get smaller and the North Pole does not get warmer. It is we who must transform, and that takes work. If the process was easy, we’d all world champions.
John Long
It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.
Theodore Roosevelt
Easy is the descent to the Lower World; but, to retrace your steps and to escape to the upper air — this is the task, this the toil.
The Sibyl
to Aeneas, in The Aeneid
Professionalism isn’t an airplane; it’s an attitude.
Lauran Paine Jr
It is not through space that I must seek my dignity, but through the management of my thought. I shall have no more if I possess worlds.
Blaise Pascal
Flying is not the hardest part of it at all, it’s the mental aspects. You learn a lot about yourself in any sport, anything that you do when you push yourself is where you really learn about who you are and what your weaknesses are, what your strengths are, and how to improve those things.
Patty Wagstaff
Flying isn’t just about physical rewards of excitement or beauty. It’s also a profound teacher of important internal lessons about life, being human, and what matters most in how we go through our time on this planet … It teaches us to not give up when the going gets rough, and that we’re really a lot stronger that we might have imagined we were. It helps us learn to respect our limitations and build on our strengths. It forces us to be honest with ourselves.
Lane Wallace
In the case of pilots, it is a little touch of madness that drives us to go beyond all known bounds. Any search into the unknown is an incomparable exploitation of oneself.
Jacqueline Auriol
The important thing is to stop lying to yourself. A man who lies to himself, and believes his own lies, becomes unable to recognize the truth, either in himself or in anyone else.
Dostoyevsky
Mastery requires endurance. Mastery, a word we don’t use often, is not the equivalent of what we might consider its cognate—perfectionism—an inhuman aim motivated by a concern with how others view us. Mastery is also not the same as success—an event-based victory based on a peak point, a punctuated moment in time. Mastery is not merely a commitment to a goal, but to a curved-line, constant pursuit.
Sarah Lewis
Perfection is attained by slow degrees; it requires the hand of time.
Voltaire
He that would perfect his work must first sharpen his tools.
Confucius
