Antoine de Saint-Exupery Quotes
-
GOOD MORNING," said the little prince. "Good Morning," said the salesclerk. This was a salesclerk who sold pills invented to quench thirst. Swallow one a week and you no longer feel any need to drink. "Why do you sell these pills?" "They save so much time," the salesclerk said. "Experts have calculated that you can save fifty-three minutes a week." "And what do you do with those fifty-three minutes?" "Whatever you like." "If I had fifty-three minutes to spend as I liked," the little prince said to himself, "I'd walk very slowly toward a water fountain.
-
You are beautiful, but you are empty,” he went on. “One could not die for you. To be sure, an ordinary passerby would think that my rose looked just like you--the rose that belongs to me.
-
Experience will guide us to the rules. You cannot make rules precede practical experience.
-
Night, when words fade and things come alive.
-
The flower you single out is a rejection of all other flowers; nevertheless, only on these terms is it beautiful.
-
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.
-
Living is being born slowly. It would be a little too easy if we could borrow ready-made souls.
-
Perfection is reachednot when there's nothing to add, but when there's nothing to take away.
-
It's all a great mystery...Look up at the sky and you'll see how everything changes.
-
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.
-
A child is not frightened at the thought of being patiently transmuted into an old man.
-
If a composer suffers from loss of sleep and his sleeplessness induces him to turn out masterpieces, what a profitable loss it is!
-
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.
-
My life is very monotonous," the fox said. "I hunt chickens; men hunt me. All the chickens are just alike, and all the men are just alike. And, in consequence, I am a little bored.
-
A single event can awaken within us a stranger totally unknown to us.
-
One is a member of a country, a profession, a civilization, a religion. One is not just a man.
-
A man has many parts, he is virtually everything, and you are free to select in him that part which pleases you.
-
The only things you learn are the things you tame.
-
All of us have had the experience of a sudden joy that came when nothing in the world had forewarned us of its coming - a joy so thrilling that if it was born of misery we remembered even the misery with tenderness.
-
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.
-
We understand … that what constitutes the dignity of a craft is that it creates a fellowship, that it binds men together and fashions for them a common language.
-
I am who I am and I have the need to be.
-
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.
-
It is the time you have wasted for your rose that makes your rose so important.