Antoine de Saint-Exupery Quotes
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I remembered the fox. One runs the risk of crying a bit if one allows oneself to be tamed.
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For, to conceited men, all other men are admirers.
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How could drops of water know themselves to be a river? Yet the river flows on.
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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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Of course I’ll hurt you. Of course you’ll hurt me. Of course we will hurt each other. But this is the very condition of existence. To become spring, means accepting the risk of winter. To become presence, means accepting the risk of absence.
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You risk tears if you let yourself be tamed.
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More wisdom is latent in things as they are than in all the words men use.
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The first stars tremble as if shimmering in green water. Hours must pass before their glimmer hardens into the frozen glitter of diamonds. I shall have a long wait before I witness the soundless frolic of the shooting stars. In the profound darkness of certain nights I have seen the sky streaked with so many trailing sparks that it seemed to me a great gale must be blowing through the outer heavens.
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One runs the risk of weeping a little, if one lets himself be tamed.
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If I had fifty-three minutes to spend as I liked, I should walk at my leisure toward a spring of fresh water.
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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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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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A single event can awaken within us a stranger totally unknown to us.
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But games always cover something deep and intense, else there would be no excitement in them, no pleasure, no power to stir us.
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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.
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I know a planet where there is a certain red-faced gentleman. He has never smelled a flower. He has never looked at a star. He has never loved any one. He has never done anything in his life but add up figures. And all day he says over and over, just like you: 'I am busy with matters of consequence!' And that makes him swell up with pride. But he is not a man - he is a mushroom!
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Night, when words fade and things come alive.
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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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The theoretician believes in logic and believes that he despises dreams, intuition, and poetry. He does not recognize that these three fairies have only disguised themselves in order to dazzle him.... He does not know that he owes his greatest discoveries to them.
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He who would travel happy must travel lite.
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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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To forget a friend is sad. Not everyone has had a friend.
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A child is not frightened at the thought of being patiently transmuted into an old man.
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I am who I am and I have the need to be.