Antoine de Saint-Exupery Quotes

You are beautiful, but you are empty,” he went on. “One could not die for you. To be sure, an ordinary passerby would think that my rose looked just like you--the rose that belongs to me.

No individual is isolated. He who is sad, saddens others.

If you want to build a ship, don't summon people to buy wood, prepare tools, distribute jobs, and organize the work; teach people the yearning for the wide, boundless ocean.

When one is building a ship, one does not begin with gathering timber and cutting planks, but rather by arousing in people the yearning for the great wide sea.

Let your dream devour your life, not your life devour your dream.

In order to cure a feeling of malaise, you have to throw light on it.

The time for action is now. It's never too late to do something.

To be a man is, precisely, to be responsible. It is to feel shame at the sight of what seems to be unmerited misery. It is to take pride in a victory won by one's comrades. It is to feel, when setting one's stone, that one is contributing to the building of the world.

Horror causes men to clench their fists, and in horror men join together.

If it is true that wars are won by believers, it is also true that peace treaties are sometimes signed by businessmen.

It's useful because it's beautiful.

Of course I’ll hurt you. Of course you’ll hurt me. Of course we will hurt each other. But this is the very condition of existence. To become spring, means accepting the risk of winter. To become presence, means accepting the risk of absence.

I know a planet where there is a certain red-faced gentleman. He has never smelled a flower. He has never looked at a star. He has never loved any one. He has never done anything in his life but add up figures. And all day he says over and over, just like you: 'I am busy with matters of consequence!' And that makes him swell up with pride. But he is not a man - he is a mushroom!

War is not an adventure. It is a disease. It is like typhus.

When the body sinks into death, the essence of man is revealed. Man is a knot, a web, a mesh into which relationships are tied. Only those relationships matter. The body is an old crock that nobody will miss. I have never known a man to think of himself when dying. Never.

I saw the sunset forty-four times!

And at night I love to listen to the stars. It is like five hundred million little bells.

The field of consciousness is tiny. It accepts only one problem at a time. Get into a fist fight, put your mind on the strategy of the fight, and you will not feel the other fellow's punches.

How could drops of water know themselves to be a river? Yet the river flows on.

True happiness comes from the joy of deeds well done, the zest of creating things new.

He who has gone, so we but cherish his memory, abides with us, more potent, nay, more present than the living man.

And now here is my secret, a very simple secret; it is only with the heart that one can see rightly, what is essential is invisible to the eye.

The injustice of defeat lies in the fact that its most innocent victims are made to look like heartless accomplices. It is impossible to see behind defeat, the sacrifices, the austere performance of duty, the self-discipline and the vigilance that are there - those things the god of battle does not take account of.

I remembered the fox. One runs the risk of crying a bit if one allows oneself to be tamed.

My senses of space, of distance, and of direction entirely vanished. When I looked for the ground I sometimes looked down, sometimes up, sometimes left, sometimes right. I thought I was very high up when I would suddenly be thown to earth in a near vertical spin. I thought I was very low to the ground and I was pulled up to 3,000 feet in two minutes by the 500-horsepower motor. It danced, it pushed, it tossed. . . . Ah! la la!

What sets men at variance is but the treachery of language, for always they desire the same things.

It's all a great mystery...Look up at the sky and you'll see how everything changes

When a mystery is too overpowering, one dare not disobey.

Using an artful tool does not make one a dry technician. It seems to me that people that are anxious about our technical advancement, confuse means and ends. Naturally a person that only works for material gain will not harvest something that is worth living for. But the machine is not an end in itself. The airplane is not an end. It is a tool. Just like the plough.

Sorrow is one of the vibrations that prove the fact of living.

Man's progress is but a gradual discovery that his questions have no meaning.

It's hard luck always having to be a judge.

The machine does not isolate man from the great problems of nature but plunges him more deeply into them.

Charity never humiliated him who profited from it, nor ever bound him by the chains of gratitude, since it was not to him but to God that the gift was made.

I am who I am and I have the need to be.

There is no hope of joy except in human relations.

Cries of despair, misery, sobbing grief are a kind of wealth.

How could there be any question of acquiring or possessing, when the one thing needful for a man is to become - to be at last, and to die in the fullness of his being.

The strong are strengthened by reverses; the trouble is that the true meaning of events scores next to nothing in the match we play with men. Appearances decide our gains or losses and the points are trumpery. And a mere semblance of defeat may hopelessly checkmate us.

Only the unknown frightens men. But once a man has faced the unknown, that terror becomes the known.

How desperately difficult it is to be honest with oneself. It is much easier to be honest with other people.What is true is invisible to the eye. It is only with the heart that one can see clearly.

It is the time you have wasted for your rose that makes your rose so important.

That is the hardest thing of all. It is much harder to judge yourself than to judge others. If you succeed in judging yourself, it's because you're truly a wise man.

Life has meaning only if one barters it day by day for something other than itself.

That's the way they are. You must not hold it against them. Children should be very understanding of grown-ups.

You'll be bothered from time to time by storms, fog, snow. When you are, think of those who went through it before you, and say to yourself, 'What they could do, I can do.'

What he had yearned to embrace was not the flesh but a down spirit, a spark, the impalpable angel that inhabits the flesh.

Only he can understand what a farm is, what a country is, who shall have sacrificed part of himself to his farm or country, fought to save it, struggled to make it beautiful. Only then will the love of farm or country fill his heart.