Antoine de Saint-Exupery Quotes
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True happiness comes from the joy of deeds well done, the zest of creating things new.
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Once you are my friend, I am responsible for you.
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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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Navigating by the compass in a sea of clouds over Spain is all very well, it is very dashing, but - you want to remember that below the sea of clouds lies eternity.
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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.
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Life has meaning only if one barters it day by day for something other than itself.
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You do not explain the tree by telling of the water it has drunk, the minerals it has absorbed, and the sunlight that strengthened it.
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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.
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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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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.
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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.
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War is not an adventure. It is a disease. It is like typhus.
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And the little prince broke into a lovely peal of laughter, which irritated me very much. I like my misfortunes to be taken seriously.
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On ne sait jamais! One never knows!
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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.
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I shall never again admire a merely brave man.
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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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It is the savor of bread broken with comrades that makes us accept the values of war.
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I have always learned to distinguish the important from the urgent.
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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.
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To be a man is to feel that one's own stone contributes to building the edifice of the world.
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When someone blushes, doesn't that mean 'yes'?
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Nothing comes of severity if there be no leanings towards a change of heart. And if there be natural leanings towards a change of heart, what need for severity?
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Truths may clash without contradicting each other.