Antoine de Saint-Exupery Quotes
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What have you come to Earth for?' 'I'm having difficulties with a flower,' the little prince said. 'Ah!' said the snake. And they were both silent.
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Man is a knot into which relationships are tied.
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Once you are my friend, I am responsible for you.
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You're beautiful, but you're empty.... No one could die 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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When you give yourself, you receive more than you give.
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Truth, for any man, is that which makes him a man.
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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.
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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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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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Life has meaning only if one barters it day by day for something other than itself.
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The tree is a slow, enduring force straining to win the sky.
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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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I know but one freedom, and that is the freedom of the mind.
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On ne sait jamais! One never knows!
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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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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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No destiny attacks us from outside. But, within him, man bears his fate and there comes a moment when he knows himself vulnerable; and then, as in a vertigo, blunder upon blunder lures him.
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Truths may clash without contradicting each other.
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True love is inexhaustible; the more you give, the more you have.
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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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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.