Antoine de Saint-Exupery Quotes
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When one is building a ship, one does not begin with gathering timber and cutting planks, but rather by arousing in people the yearning for the great wide sea.
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He had taken seriously words which were without importance, and it made him very unhappy.
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It is the time you have wasted for your rose that makes your rose so important.
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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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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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And at night I love to listen to the stars. It is like five hundred million little bells.
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It's a question of discipline,' the little prince told me later on. 'when you've finished washing and dressing each morning, you must tend your planet. you must be sure you pull up the baobabs regularly, as soon as you can tell them apart from the rosebushes, which they closely resemble when they're very young. It's very tedious work, but very easy.
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The job has its grandeurs, yes. There is the exultation of arriving safely after a storm, the joy of gliding down out of the darkness of night or tempest toward a sun-drenched Alicante or Santiago; there is the swelling sense of returning to repossess one's place in life, in the miraculous garden of earth, where are trees and women and, down by the harbor, friendly little bars. When he has throttled his engine and is banking into the airport, leaving the somber cloud masses behind, what pilot does not break into song?
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Perfection is reachednot when there's nothing to add, but when there's nothing to take away.
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If you are to be, you must begin by assuming responsibility. You alone are responsible for every moment of your life, for every one of your acts.
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One can be a brother only in something. Where there is no tie that binds men, men are not united but merely lined up.
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A child is not frightened at the thought of being patiently transmuted into an old man.
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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.
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People where you live," the little prince said, "grow five thousand roses in one garden... yet they don't find what they're looking for... They don't find it," I answered. And yet what they're looking for could be found in a single rose, or a little water..." Of course," I answered. And the little prince added, "But eyes are blind. You have to look with the heart.
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If it is true that wars are won by believers, it is also true that peace treaties are sometimes signed by businessmen.
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If a composer suffers from loss of sleep and his sleeplessness induces him to turn out masterpieces, what a profitable loss it is!
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I am a fox", the fox said.
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When I find a woman attractive, I have nothing at all to say. I simply watch her smile. Intellectuals take apart her face in order to explain it bit by bit, but they no longer see the smile.
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The tree is a slow, enduring force straining to win the sky.
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Truth is not that which is demonstrable but that which is ineluctable.
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Love does not consist in gazing at each other, but in looking outward together in the same direction.
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Perfection is finally attained not when there is no longer anything to add but when there is no longer anything to take away, when a body has been stripped down to its nakedness.
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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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A sky as pure as water bathed the stars and brought them out.