Antoine de Saint-Exupery famous quotes
Last updated: Jul 22, 2024
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True happiness comes from the joy of deeds well done, the zest of creating things new.
-- Antoine de Saint-Exupery -
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.
-- Antoine de Saint-Exupery -
Love does not consist in gazing at each other, but in looking outward together in the same direction.
-- Antoine de Saint-Exupery -
The meaning of things lies not in the things themselves, but in our attitude towards them.
-- Antoine de Saint-Exupery -
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It is only with the heart that one can see rightly.
-- Antoine de Saint-Exupery -
A single event can awaken within us a stranger totally unknown to us.
-- Antoine de Saint-Exupery -
"What place would you advise me to visit now?" he asked. "The planet Earth," replied the geographer. "It has a good reputation."
-- Antoine de Saint-Exupery -
The time for action is now. It's never too late to do something.
-- Antoine de Saint-Exupery -
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You - you alone will have the stars as no one else has them...In one of the stars I shall be living. In one of them I shall be laughing. And so it will be as if all the stars were laughing, when you look at the sky at night...You - only you - will have stars that can laugh.
-- Antoine de Saint-Exupery -
A rock pile ceases to be a rock pile the moment a single man contemplates it, bearing within him the image of a cathedral.
-- Antoine de Saint-Exupery -
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!
-- Antoine de Saint-Exupery -
True love begins when nothing is looked for in return.
-- Antoine de Saint-Exupery -
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The machine does not isolate man from the great problems of nature but plunges him more deeply into them.
-- Antoine de Saint-Exupery -
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.
-- Antoine de Saint-Exupery -
Tell me who admires and loves you, and I will tell you who you are.
-- Antoine de Saint-Exupery -
I know but one freedom and that is the freedom of the mind.
-- Antoine de Saint-Exupery -
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For true love is inexhaustible; the more you give, the more you have. And if you go to draw at the true fountainhead, the more water you draw, the more abundant is its flow.
-- Antoine de Saint-Exupery -
It is such a secret place, the land of tears.
-- Antoine de Saint-Exupery -
You become responsible, forever, for what you have tamed.
-- Antoine de Saint-Exupery -
All grown-ups were once children... but only few of them remember it.
-- Antoine de Saint-Exupery -
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No single event can awaken within us a stranger whose existence we had never suspected. To live is to be slowly born.
-- Antoine de Saint-Exupery -
Pure logic is the ruin of the spirit.
-- Antoine de Saint-Exupery -
What he had yearned to embrace was not the flesh but a down spirit, a spark, the impalpable angel that inhabits the flesh.
-- Antoine de Saint-Exupery -
I have lived a great deal among grown-ups. I have seen them intimately, close at hand. And that hasn’t much improved my opinion of them.
-- Antoine de Saint-Exupery -
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When you give yourself, you receive more than you give.
-- Antoine de Saint-Exupery -
In every crowd are certain persons who seem just like the rest, yet they bear amazing messages.
-- Antoine de Saint-Exupery -
It is always in the midst, in the epicenter, of your troubles that you find serenity.
-- Antoine de Saint-Exupery -
What saves a man is to take a step. Then another step. It is always the same step, but you have to take it.
-- Antoine de Saint-Exupery -
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But eyes are blind. You have to look with the heart.
-- Antoine de Saint-Exupery -
Once you are my friend, I am responsible for you.
-- Antoine de Saint-Exupery -
You know you've achieved perfection in design, not when you have nothing more to add, but when you have nothing more to take away.
-- Antoine de Saint-Exupery -
No single event can awaken within us a stranger totally unknown to us. To live is to be slowly born. It would be a bit too easy if we could go about borrowing ready-made souls.
-- Antoine de Saint-Exupery -
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Each man must look to himself to teach him the meaning of life. It is not something discovered: it is something molded.
-- Antoine de Saint-Exupery -
Each man carries within him the soul of a poet who died young.
-- Antoine de Saint-Exupery -
Perfection is not when there is no more to add, but no more to take away.
-- Antoine de Saint-Exupery -
Mad is the man who is forever gritting his teeth against that granite block, complete and changeless, of the past.
-- Antoine de Saint-Exupery -
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Sometimes we behave as though there was something more important than life. But what?
-- Antoine de Saint-Exupery -
Although human life is priceless, we always act as if something had an even greater price than life... but what is that something?
-- Antoine de Saint-Exupery -
A chief is a man who assumes responsibility. He says 'I was beaten,' he does not say 'My men were beaten.'
-- Antoine de Saint-Exupery -
In giving you are throwing a bridge across the chasm of your solitude.
-- Antoine de Saint-Exupery -
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It is much more difficult to judge oneself than to judge others.
-- Antoine de Saint-Exupery -
Perfection is finally attained not when there is no longer anything to add but when there is no longer anything to take away, when a body has been stripped down to its nakedness.
-- Antoine de Saint-Exupery -
Transport of the mails, transport of the human voice, transport of flickering pictures-in this century as in others our highest accomplishments still have the single aim of bringing men together.
-- Antoine de Saint-Exupery -
If you are to be, you must begin by assuming responsibility. You alone are responsible for every moment of your life, for every one of your acts.
-- Antoine de Saint-Exupery -
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There is no hope of joy except in human relations.
-- Antoine de Saint-Exupery -
How could drops of water know themselves to be a river? Yet the river flows on.
-- Antoine de Saint-Exupery -
If Someone wants a sheep, then that means that he exists.
-- Antoine de Saint-Exupery -
Only the unknown frightens men. But once a man has faced the unknown, that terror becomes the known.
-- Antoine de Saint-Exupery -
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The field of consciousness is tiny. It accepts only one problem at a time.
-- Antoine de Saint-Exupery -
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.
-- Antoine de Saint-Exupery -
Man is a knot into which relationships are tied.
-- Antoine de Saint-Exupery -
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.
-- Antoine de Saint-Exupery -
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Whoever loves above all the approach of love will never know the joy of attaining it.
-- Antoine de Saint-Exupery -
On a day of burial there is no perspective--for space itself is annihilated. Your dead friend is still a fragmentary being. The day you bury him is a day of chores and crowds, of hands false or true to be shaken, of the immediate cares of mourning. The dead friend will not really die until tomorrow, when silence is round you again. Then he will show himself complete, as he was--to tear himself away, as he was, from the substantial you. Only then will you cry out because of him who is leaving and whom you cannot detain.
-- Antoine de Saint-Exupery -
We don’t ask to be eternal beings. We only ask that things do not lose all their meaning.
-- Antoine de Saint-Exupery -
Life has meaning only if one barters it day by day for something other than itself.
-- Antoine de Saint-Exupery -
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Grown-ups never understand anything for themselves, and it is tiresome for children to be always and forever explaining things to them.
-- Antoine de Saint-Exupery -
It is in the compelling zest of high adventure and of victory, and in creative action, that man finds his supreme joys.
-- Antoine de Saint-Exupery -
I fly because it releases my mind from the tyranny of petty things.
-- Antoine de Saint-Exupery -
A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.
-- Antoine de Saint-Exupery -
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What makes the desert beautiful is that somewhere it hides a well.
-- Antoine de Saint-Exupery -
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.
-- Antoine de Saint-Exupery -
As for the future, your task is not to foresee it, but to enable it.
-- Antoine de Saint-Exupery -
I have no right, by anything I do or say, to demean a human being in his own eyes. What matters is not what I think of him; it is what he thinks of himself. To undermine a man's self-respect is a sin.
-- Antoine de Saint-Exupery -
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It is in your act that you exist, not in your body. Your act is yourself, and there is no other you.
-- Antoine de Saint-Exupery -
Why are you drinking? demanded the little prince. "So that I may forget," replied the tippler. "Forget what?" inquired the little prince, who was already sorry for him. "Forget that I am ashamed," the tippler confessed, hanging his head. "Ashamed of what?" insisted the little prince, who wanted to help him. "Ashamed of drinking!
-- Antoine de Saint-Exupery -
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.
-- Antoine de Saint-Exupery -
If you tame me, it would be as if the sun came to shine on my life.
-- Antoine de Saint-Exupery -
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To forget a friend is sad. Not everyone has had a friend.
-- Antoine de Saint-Exupery -
If France is to be judged, judge her not by the effects of her defeat but by her readiness to sacrifice herself.
-- Antoine de Saint-Exupery -
Treason implies responsibility for something, control over something, influence upon something, knowledge of something. Treason in our time is a proof of genius. Why, I want to know, are not traitors decorated?
-- Antoine de Saint-Exupery -
The essential is invisible to the eyes.
-- Antoine de Saint-Exupery -
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We are forever responsible for that which we have tamed.
-- Antoine de Saint-Exupery -
I have always loved the desert. One sits down on a desert sand dune, sees nothing, hears nothing. Yet through the silence something throbs, and gleams...
-- Antoine de Saint-Exupery -
Night, when words fade and things come alive.
-- Antoine de Saint-Exupery -
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.
-- Antoine de Saint-Exupery -
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Man is, above all, he who creates.
-- Antoine de Saint-Exupery -
Let a man in a garret but burn with enough intensity and he will set fire to the world.
-- Antoine de Saint-Exupery -
Demagoguery enters at the moment when, for want of a common denominator, the principle of equality degenerates into the principle of identity.
-- Antoine de Saint-Exupery -
Straight ahead you can't go very far.
-- Antoine de Saint-Exupery -
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To forget a friend is sad. Not every one has had a friend. And if I forget him, I may become like the grown−ups who are no longer interested in anything but figures..
-- Antoine de Saint-Exupery -
But if you tame me, my life will be filled with sunshine. I'll know the sound of footsteps that will be different from all the rest. Others send me back underground. Yours will call me out of my burrow like music.
-- Antoine de Saint-Exupery -
You know...my flower...I'm responsible for her. And she's so weak! And so naive. She has four ridiculous thorns to defend her against the world...
-- Antoine de Saint-Exupery -
When I opened my eyes I saw nothing but the pool of nocturnal sky, for I was lying on my back with out-stretched arms, face to face with that hatchery of stars. Only half awake, still unaware that those depths were sky, having no roof between those depths and me, no branches to screen them, no root to cling to, I was seized with vertigo and felt myself as if flung forth and plunging downward like a diver.
-- Antoine de Saint-Exupery -
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How is it possible for one to own the stars?" "To whom do they belong?" the businessman retorted, peevishly. "I don't know. To nobody.
-- Antoine de Saint-Exupery -
He sat down. I sat down next to him. And after a silence, he spoke again. 'The stars are beautiful because of a flower you don't see...' I answered, 'Yes, of course.
-- Antoine de Saint-Exupery -
Grown-ups love figures... When you tell them you've made a new friend they never ask you any questions about essential matters. They never say to you "What does his voice sound like? What games does he love best? Does he collect butterflies? " Instead they demand "How old is he? How much does he weigh? How much money does his father make? " Only from these figures do they think they have learned anything about him.
-- Antoine de Saint-Exupery -
I am who I am and I have the need to be.
-- Antoine de Saint-Exupery -
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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.
-- Antoine de Saint-Exupery -
One day," you said to me, "I saw the sunset forty-four times!" And a little later you added: "You know-- one loves the sunset, when one is so sad..." "Were you so sad, then?" I asked, "on the day of the forty-four sunsets?" But the little prince made no reply.
-- Antoine de Saint-Exupery -
But certainly, for us who understand life, figures are a matter of indifference.
-- Antoine de Saint-Exupery -
It's quite simple: One sees clearly only with the heart. Anything essential is invisible to the eyes. [Fr., Il est tres simple: on ne voit bien qu'avec le coeur. L'essentiel est invisible pour les yeux.]
-- Antoine de Saint-Exupery -
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Si quelqu'un veut un mouton, c'est la preuve qu'il en existe un. (If somebody wants a sheep, that is a proof that one exists.)
-- Antoine de Saint-Exupery -
My drawing was not a picture of a hat. It was a picture of a boa constrictor digesting an elephant.
-- Antoine de Saint-Exupery -
In order to cure a feeling of malaise, you have to throw light on it.
-- Antoine de Saint-Exupery -
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!
-- Antoine de Saint-Exupery -
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Grown ups are certainly very strange.
-- Antoine de Saint-Exupery -
He had taken seriously words which were without importance, and it made him very unhappy.
-- Antoine de Saint-Exupery -
I'll look as if I'm dead, and that won't be true.' I said nothing. 'You understand. It's too far. I can't take this body with me. It's too heavy.' I said nothing. 'But it'll be like an old abandoned shell. There's nothing sad about an old shell...' I said nothing. 'It'll be nice, you know. I'll be looking at the stars, too. All the stars will be wells with a rusty pulley. All the stars will pour out water for me to drink...' I said nothing. 'And it'll be fun! You'll have five-hundred million little bells; I'll have five-hundred million springs of fresh water...' And he, too, said nothing more.
-- Antoine de Saint-Exupery -
Cries of despair, misery, sobbing grief are a kind of wealth.
-- Antoine de Saint-Exupery -
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