Antoine de Saint-Exupery Quotes
-
Perhaps creativity is fumbling that dance step, or driving the chisel the wrong way into the stone.
-
For, to conceited men, all other men are admirers.
-
To be a man is, precisely, to be responsible. It is to feel shame at the sight of what seems to be unmerited misery. It is to take pride in a victory won by one's comrades. It is to feel, when setting one's stone, that one is contributing to the building of the world.
-
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.
-
A child is not frightened at the thought of being patiently transmuted into an old man.
-
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.
-
Every person that comes into our life comes for a reason; some come to learn and others come to teach.
-
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.
-
Freedom and constraint are two aspects of the same necessity, which is to be what one is and no other.
-
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.
-
If you tame me, it would be as if the sun came to shine on my life.
-
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.
-
He who bears in his heart a cathedral to be built is already victorious. He who seeks to become sexton of a finished cathedral is already defeated.
-
If a composer suffers from loss of sleep and his sleeplessness induces him to turn out masterpieces, what a profitable loss it is!
-
I wonder," he said, "whether the stars are set alight in heaven so that one day each one of us may find his own again.
-
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.
-
A man has many parts, he is virtually everything, and you are free to select in him that part which pleases you.
-
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.
-
The flower you single out is a rejection of all other flowers; nevertheless, only on these terms is it beautiful.
-
Demagoguery enters at the moment when, for want of a common denominator, the principle of equality degenerates into the principle of identity.
-
When I opened my eyes I saw nothing but the pool of nocturnal sky, for I was lying on my back with out-stretched arms, face to face with that hatchery of stars. Only half awake, still unaware that those depths were sky, having no roof between those depths and me, no branches to screen them, no root to cling to, I was seized with vertigo and felt myself as if flung forth and plunging downward like a diver.
-
I remembered the fox. One runs the risk of crying a bit if one allows oneself to be tamed.
-
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.
-
If a sheep eats bushes does it eat flowers too? a sheep eats whatever it finds even a flower with thorn? even a flower with thorns. then what's the good of thorns?