Antoine de Saint-Exupery Quotes
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In those days, I didn't understand anything. I should have judged her according to her actions, not her words. She perfumed my planet and lit up my life. I should never have run away! I ought to have realized the tenderness underlying her silly pretensions. Flowers are so contadictory! But I was too young to know how to love her.
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When the body sinks into death, the essence of man is revealed. Man is a knot, a web, a mesh into which relationships are tied. Only those relationships matter. The body is an old crock that nobody will miss. I have never known a man to think of himself when dying. Never.
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In every crowd are certain persons who seem just like the rest, yet they bear amazing messages.
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True, it is evil that a single man should crush the herd, but see not there the worse form of slavery, which is when the herd crushes out the man.
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What was my body to me? A kind of flunkey in my service. Let but my anger wax hot, my love grow exalted, my hatred collect in me, and that boasted solidarity between me and my body was gone.
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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.
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A goal without a pan is just a wish.
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When someone blushes, doesn't that mean 'yes'?
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If you tame me, it would be as if the sun came to shine on my life.
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Are wars... anything but the means whereby a nation's problems are set, where creation is stimulated - there you have adventure. But there is no adventure in heads-or-tails, in betting that the toss will come out of life or death. War is not an adventure. It is a disease. It is like typhus.
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For, to conceited men, all other men are admirers.
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One is a member of a country, a profession, a civilization, a religion. One is not just a man.
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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.
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We live not by things, but by the meaning of things. It is needful to transmit the passwords from generation to generation.
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But eyes are blind. You have to look with the heart.
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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.
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Life always bursts the boundaries of formulas.
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Living is being born slowly. It would be a little too easy if we could borrow ready-made souls.
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It's all a great mystery...Look up at the sky and you'll see how everything changes.
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We are all youthful barbarians, and only our new toys bring us excitement. That has been the sole purpose of our flights. This one flies higher, that one faster. But now we will make ourselves at home. We will forget the machine, the tool. It is no longer complex; it does what it is supposed to do, unnoticed. And through this tool we will find again the old nature, the nature of the gardener, the navigator, the poet.
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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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A child is not frightened at the thought of being patiently transmuted into an old man.
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Demagoguery enters at the moment when, for want of a common denominator, the principle of equality degenerates into the principle of identity.
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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.