Antoine de Saint-Exupery Quotes
-
Men have no more time to understand anything. They buy things all ready made at the shops. But there is no shop anywhere where one can buy friendship, and so men have no friends any more. If you want a friend, tame me.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
If a composer suffers from loss of sleep and his sleeplessness induces him to turn out masterpieces, what a profitable loss it is!
-
The field of consciousness is tiny. It accepts only one problem at a time.
-
A man's age represents a fine cargo of experiences and memories.
-
Charity never humiliated him who profited from it, nor ever bound him by the chains of gratitude, since it was not to him but to God that the gift was made.
-
And at night I love to listen to the stars. It is like five hundred million little bells.
-
Peace dies when the framework is ripped apart. When there is no longer a place that is yours in the world. When you know no longer where your friend is to be found.
-
You cannot plant an acorn in the morning, and expect that afternoon to sit in the shade of an oak.
-
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.
-
It is not a question of living dangerously. That formula is too arrogant, too presumptuous. I don't care much for bull-fighters. It's not the danger I love. I know what I love. It is life itself.
-
If you tame me, it would be as if the sun came to shine on my life.
-
I remembered the fox. One runs the risk of crying a bit if one allows oneself to be tamed.
-
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.
-
Love does not consist in gazing at each other, but in looking outward together in the same direction.
-
If some one loves a flower of which just one example exists among all the millions and millions of stars, that's enough to make him happy when he looks at the stars. He tells himself, "My flower's up there somewhere. . . ." But if the sheep eats the flower, then for him it's as if, suddenly, all the stars went out. And that isn't important?
-
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.
-
Experience will guide us to the rules. You cannot make rules precede practical experience.
-
Grown-ups love figures... When you tell them you've made a new friend they never ask you any questions about essential matters. They never say to you "What does his voice sound like? What games does he love best? Does he collect butterflies? " Instead they demand "How old is he? How much does he weigh? How much money does his father make? " Only from these figures do they think they have learned anything about him.
-
One runs the risk of weeping a little, if one lets himself be tamed.
-
Of course, I love you,' the flower said to him. 'If you were not aware of it, it was my fault.