Antoine de Saint-Exupery Quotes
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The tree is a slow, enduring force straining to win the sky.
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When you give yourself, you receive more than you give.
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Mad is the man who is forever gritting his teeth against that granite block, complete and changeless, of the past.
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Life has meaning only if one barters it day by day for something other than itself.
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On ne sait jamais! One never knows!
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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.
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And they heard the roaring thunder of a third brilliantly lighted express. "Are they pursuing the first travelers?" demanded the little prince. "They are pursuing nothing at all," said the switchman. "They are asleep in there, or if they are not asleep they are yawning. Only the children are flattening their noses against the windowpanes." "Only the children know what they are looking for," said the little prince. "They waste their time over a rag doll and it becomes very important to them; and if anybody takes it away from them, they cry..." "They are lucky," the switchman said.
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Once you are my friend, I am responsible for you.
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Good taste" is a virtue of the keepers of museums. If you scorn bad taste, you will have neither painting nor dancing, neither palaces nor gardens.
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Man is a knot into which relationships are tied.
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Peace is present when things form part of a whole greater than their sum, as the diverse minerals in the ground collect to become the tree.
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You're beautiful, but you're empty.... No one could die for you.
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A rock pile ceases to be a rock pile the moment a single man contemplates it, bearing within him the image of a cathedral.
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Night, the beloved. Night, when words fade and things come alive. When the destructive analysis of day is done, and all that is truly important becomes whole and sound again. When man reassembles his fragmentary self and grows with the calm of a tree.
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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.
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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.
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It is the missed opportunity that counts, and in a love that vainly yearns from behind prison bars you have perchance the love supreme.
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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!
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Let a man in a garret but burn with enough intensity and he will set fire to the world.
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I showed the grown ups my masterpiece, andI asked them if my drawing scared them. They answered why be scared of a hat? My drawing was not a picture of a hat. It was a picture of a boa constrictor digesting an elephant.
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For instance, if you come at four in the afternoon, I'll begin to be happy by three. The closer it gets to four, the happier I'll feel. By four I'll be excited and worried; I'll discover what it costs to be happy! But if you come at any od time, I'll never know when I should prepare my heart... There must be rites.
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The essential things in life are seen, not with the eyes but with the heart.
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We say nothing essential about the cathedral when we speak of its stones. We say nothing essential about Man when we seek to define him by the qualities of men.
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True love is inexhaustible; the more you give, the more you have.