Antoine de Saint-Exupery Quotes

What was my body to me? A kind of flunkey in my service. Let but my anger wax hot, my love grow exalted, my hatred collect in me, and that boasted solidarity between me and my body was gone.

If you want to build a ship, teach the men to yearn for the vast and endless sea.

I ought not to have listened to her,' he confided to me one day. 'One never ought to listen to the flowers. One should simply look at them and breathe their fragrance. Mine perfumed all my planet. But I did not know how to take pleasure in all her grace.

What sets us against one another is not our aims - they all come to the same thing - but our methods, which are the fruit of our varied reasoning.

But eyes are blind. You have to look with the heart.

One must observe the proper rites.

In those days, I didn't understand anything. I should have judged her according to her actions, not her words. She perfumed my planet and lit up my life. I should never have run away! I ought to have realized the tenderness underlying her silly pretensions. Flowers are so contadictory! But I was too young to know how to love her.

Experience will guide us to the rules. You cannot make rules precede practical experience.

No truth is proved, no truth achieved, by argument, and the ready-made truths men offer you are mere conveniences or drugs to make you sleep.

Man is a knot into which relationships are tied.

When you want to build a ship, then do not drum the men together in order to procure wood, to give instructions or to distribute the work, but teach them longing for the wide endless sea.

You give birth to that on which you fix your mind

If I were to command a general to turn into a seagull, and if the general did not obey, that would not be the general's fault. It would be mine.

Only the children know what they are looking for.

True love is visible not to the eyes but to the heart, for eyes may be deceived.

A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.

My drawing was not a picture of a hat. It was a picture of a boa constrictor digesting an elephant.

I am looking for friends. What does that mean - tame?" "It is an act too often neglected," said the fox. "It means to establish ties." "To establish ties?" "Just that," said the fox. "To me, you are still nothing more than a little boy who is just like a hundred thousand other little boys. And I have no need of you. And you, on your part, have no need of me. To you I am nothing more than a fox like a hundred thousand other foxes. But if you tame me, then we shall need each other. To me, you will be unique in all the world. To you, I shall be unique in all the world.

To grasp the meaning of the world of today we use a language created to express the world of yesterday. The life of the past seems to us nearer our true natures, but only for the reason that it is nearer our language.

He had taken seriously words which were without importance, and it made him very unhappy.

He who is different from me does not impoverish me - he enriches me. Our unity is constituted in something higher than ourselves - in Man... For no man seeks to hear his own echo, or to find his reflection in the glass.

You're beautiful, but you're empty.... No one could die for you.

It is not for us to forecast the future, but to shape it.

He who must travel happily must travel light.

Nothing can match the treasure of common memories.

Of course, I love you,' the flower said to him. 'If you were not aware of it, it was my fault.

She knew this man's smile, his gentle ways of love, but not his godlike fury in the storm. She might snare him in a fragile net of music, love and flowers, but, at each departure, he would break forth without, it seemed to her, the least regret.

A child is not frightened at the thought of being patiently transmuted into an old man.

There is no growth except in the fulfillment of obligations.

Trying to be witty leads to lying, more or less.

Living is being born slowly. It would be a little too easy if we could borrow ready-made souls.

To forget a friend is sad. Not everyone has had a friend.

I am very fond of sunsets. Come, let us go look at a sunset.

We are forever responsible for that which we have tamed.

Make your life a dream, and a dream a reality.

There is a cheap literature that speaks to us of the need of escape. It is true that when we travel we are in search of distance. But distance is not to be found. It melts away. And escape has never led anywhere. The moment a man finds that he must play the races, go the Arctic, or make war in order to feel himself alive, that man has begin to spin the strands that bind him to other men and to the world. But what wretched strands! A civilization that is really strong fills man to the brim, though he never stir. What are we worth when motionless, is the question.

True, it is evil that a single man should crush the herd, but see not there the worse form of slavery, which is when the herd crushes out the man.

One's suffering disappears when one lets oneself go, when one yields - even to sadness.

The thing that is important is the thing that is not seen.

You risk tears if you let yourself be tamed.

A man has many parts, he is virtually everything, and you are free to select in him that part which pleases you.

Where I live, everything is very small.

A pilot's business is with the wind, and with the stars, with night, with sand, with the sea. He strives to outwit the forces of nature. He stares with expectancy for the coming of the dawn the way a gardener awaits the coming of spring. He looks forward to port as a promised land, and truth for him is what lives in the stars.

The tree is more than first a seed, then a stem, then a living trunk, and then dead timber. The tree is a slow, enduring force straining to win the sky.

Sitting in the flickering light of the candles on this kerchief of sand, on this village square, we waited in the night. We were waiting for the rescuing dawn - or for the Moors. Something, I know not what, lent this night a savor of Christmas. We told stories, we joked, we sang songs. In the air there was that slight fever that reigns over a gaily prepared feast. And yet we were infinitely poor. Wind, sand, and stars. The austerity of Trappists. But on this badly lighted cloth, a handful of men who possessed nothing in the world but their memories were sharing invisible riches.

Language is the source of misunderstandings.

Men have no more time to understand anything. They buy things all ready made at the shops. But there is no shop anywhere where one can buy friendship, and so men have no friends any more. If you want a friend, tame me.

Freedom and constraint are two aspects of the same necessity, the necessity of being the man you are and not another. You are free to be that man, but not another.