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Confuse not love with the raptures of possession, which bring the cruellest of sufferings. For, notwithstanding the general opinion, love does not cause suffering: what causes it is the sense of ownership, which is love's opposite.
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
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Once you are my friend, I am responsible for you.
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 -
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.
Antoine de Saint-Exupery -
Life has meaning only if one barters it day by day for something other than itself.
Antoine de Saint-Exupery -
To be a man is, precisely, to be responsible.
Antoine de Saint-Exupery -
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.
Antoine de Saint-Exupery
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War is not an adventure. It is a disease. It is like typhus.
Antoine de Saint-Exupery -
He who is different from me does not impoverish me - he enriches me. Our unity is constituted in something higher than ourselves - in Man... For no man seeks to hear his own echo, or to find his reflection in the glass.
Antoine de Saint-Exupery -
On ne sait jamais! One never knows!
Antoine de Saint-Exupery -
When someone blushes, doesn't that mean 'yes'?
Antoine de Saint-Exupery -
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.
Antoine de Saint-Exupery -
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.
Antoine de Saint-Exupery
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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.
Antoine de Saint-Exupery -
People have stars, but they aren't the same. For travelers, the stars are guides. For other people, they're nothing but tiny lights. And for still others, for scholars, they're problems... But all those stars are silent stars. You, though, you'll have stars like nobody else... since I'll be laughing on one of them, for you it'll be as if all the stars are laughing. You'll have stars that can laugh!... and it'll be as if I had given you, instead of stars, a lot of tiny bells that know how to laugh.
Antoine de Saint-Exupery -
The dignity of the individual demands that he be not reduced to vassalage by the largesse of others.
Antoine de Saint-Exupery -
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?
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 -
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
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At one time I say to myself: "Surely not! The little prince shuts his flower under her glass globe every night, and he watches over his sheep very carefully . . ." Then I am happy. And there is sweetness in the laughter of all the stars.
Antoine de Saint-Exupery -
Truth, for any man, is that which makes him a man.
Antoine de Saint-Exupery -
It is the savor of bread broken with comrades that makes us accept the values of war.
Antoine de Saint-Exupery -
He who never says "no" is no true man.
Antoine de Saint-Exupery