Antoine de Saint-Exupery Quotes

An administration, like a machine, does not create. It carries on.

Straight ahead you can't go very far.

You will have five hundred million little bells, and I shall have five hundred million springs of fresh water.

The airplane has unveiled for us the true face of the earth.

The magic of the craft has opened for me a world in which I shall confront, within two hours, the black dragons and the crowned crests of a coma of blue lightnings, and when night has fallen I, delivered, shall read my course in the starts.

Each man carries within him the soul of a poet who died young.

Water, thou hast no taste, no color, no odor; canst not be defined, art relished while ever mysterious. Not necessary to life, but rather life itself, thou fillest us with a gratification that exceeds the delight of the senses.

Perhaps creativity is fumbling that dance step, or driving the chisel the wrong way into the stone.

For, to conceited men, all other men are admirers.

If France is to be judged, judge her not by the effects of her defeat but by her readiness to sacrifice herself.

And that heart which was a wild garden was given to him who only loved trim lawns. And the imbecile carried the princess into slavery.

But certainly, for us who understand life, figures are a matter of indifference.

As for the future, your task is not to foresee it, but to enable it.

My life is very monotonous," the fox said. "I hunt chickens; men hunt me. All the chickens are just alike, and all the men are just alike. And, in consequence, I am a little bored.

No one has tamed you and you haven't tamed anyone.Your'e the way my fox was. He was just a fox like a hundred thousand others. But I've made him my friend, and now he's the only fox in the world.

When someone blushes, doesn't that mean 'yes'?

The soldier's body becomes a stock of accessories that are not his property.

The job has its grandeurs, yes. There is the exultation of arriving safely after a storm, the joy of gliding down out of the darkness of night or tempest toward a sun-drenched Alicante or Santiago; there is the swelling sense of returning to repossess one's place in life, in the miraculous garden of earth, where are trees and women and, down by the harbor, friendly little bars. When he has throttled his engine and is banking into the airport, leaving the somber cloud masses behind, what pilot does not break into song?