Antoine De Saint-Exupéry Quotes

Grown-ups love figures. When you talk to them about a new friend, they never ask questions about essential matters.

~ Antoine De Saint-Exupéry

A sheet spread beneath an apple-tree can receive only apples, a sheet spread beneath the stars can receive only star-dust.

~ Antoine De Saint-Exupéry

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.

~ Antoine De Saint-Exupéry

The fact is that I did not know how to understand anything! I ought to have judged by deeds and not by words. She cast her fragrance and her radiance over me. I ought never to have run away from her . . . I ought to have guessed all the affection that lay behind her poor little stratagems. Flowers are so inconsistent! But I was too young to know how to love her . . .

~ Antoine De Saint-Exupéry

Flowers are so inconsistent!

~ Antoine De Saint-Exupéry

Night, the beloved. Night, when words fade and things come alive. When the destructive analysis of day is done, and all that is truly important becomes whole and sound again. When man reassembles his fragmentary self and grows with the calm of a tree.

~ Antoine De Saint-Exupéry

A single radio post still heard him. The only link between him and the world was a wave of music, a minor modulation. Not a lament, no cry, yet purest of sounds that ever spoke despair.

~ Antoine De Saint-Exupéry

You know-- one loves the sunset, when one is so sad...Were you so sad, then? I asked, on the day of the forty-four sunsets?But the little prince made no reply.

~ Antoine De Saint-Exupéry

Even though human life may be the most precious thing on earth, we always behave as if there were something of higher value than human life.

~ Antoine De Saint-Exupéry

Experiences teaches us that to love is not to gaze at one another but to gaze together in the same direction.

~ Antoine De Saint-Exupéry

But the conceited man did not hear him. Conceited people never hear anything but praise.

~ Antoine De Saint-Exupéry

Life always bursts the boundaries of formulas. Defeat may prove to have been the only path to resurrection, despite its ugliness. I take it for granted that to create a tree I condemn a seed to rot. If the first act of resistance comes too late it is doomed to defeat. But it is, nevertheless, the awakening of resistance. Life may grow from it as from a seed.

~ Antoine De Saint-Exupéry

He who is different from me does not impoverish me - he enriches me. Our unity is constituted in something higher than ourselves - in Man... For no man seeks to hear his own echo, or to find his reflection in the glass.

~ Antoine De Saint-Exupéry

A chief is a man who assumes responsibility. He does not say My men were beaten he says I was beaten.

~ Antoine De Saint-Exupéry

Defeat is a thing of weariness of incoherence of boredom.

~ Antoine De Saint-Exupéry

It is in your act that you exist not in your body. Your act is yourself and there is no other you.

~ Antoine De Saint-Exupéry

It is the time you have wasted for your rose that makes your rose so important.

~ Antoine De Saint-Exupéry

War is not an adventure. It is a disease. It is like typhus.

~ Antoine De Saint-Exupéry

Each man must look to himself to teach him the meaning of life. It is not something discovered it is something moulded.

~ Antoine De Saint-Exupéry

A single event can awaken within us a stranger totally unknown to us.

~ Antoine De Saint-Exupéry

To be a man is precisely to be responsible.

~ Antoine De Saint-Exupéry

A chief is a man who assumes responsibility. He does not say My men were beaten he says I was beaten.

~ Antoine De Saint-Exupéry

True love begins when nothing is looked for in return.

~ Antoine De Saint-Exupéry

Why are you drinking? - the little prince asked.- In order to forget - replied the drunkard.- To forget what? - inquired the little prince, who was already feeling sorry for him.- To forget that I am ashamed - the drunkard confessed, hanging his head.- Ashamed of what? - asked the little prince who wanted to help him.- Ashamed of drinking! - concluded the drunkard, withdrawing into total silence.And the little prince went away, puzzled.'Grown-ups really are very, very odd', he said to himself as he continued his journey.

~ Antoine De Saint-Exupéry

But the vain man did not hear him. Vain men never hear anything but praise.

~ Antoine De Saint-Exupéry

The meaning of things lies not in the things themselves, but in our attitude towards them.

~ Antoine De Saint-Exupéry

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.

~ Antoine De Saint-Exupéry

What makes the desert beautiful is that somewhere it hides a well.

~ Antoine De Saint-Exupéry

War is not an adventure. It is a disease. It is like typhus.

~ Antoine De Saint-Exupéry

Love does not consist in gazing at each other, but in looking outward together in the same direction.

~ Antoine De Saint-Exupéry

Tell me who admires and loves you, and I will tell you who you are.

~ Antoine De Saint-Exupéry

If you want to build a ship, don't drum up people to collect wood and don't assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.

~ Antoine De Saint-Exupéry

True happiness comes from the joy of deeds well done, the zest of creating things new.

~ Antoine De Saint-Exupéry

It is in the compelling zest of high adventure and of victory, and in creative action, that man finds his supreme joys.

~ Antoine De Saint-Exupéry

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.

~ Antoine De Saint-Exupéry

A civilization is a heritage of beliefs, customs, and knowledge slowly accumulated in the course of centuries, elements difficult at times to justify by logic, but justifying themselves as paths when they lead somewhere, since they open up for man his inner distance.

~ Antoine De Saint-Exupéry

A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.

~ Antoine De Saint-Exupéry

The machine does not isolate man from the great problems of nature but plunges him more deeply into them.

~ Antoine De Saint-Exupéry

When you give yourself, you receive more than you give.

~ Antoine De Saint-Exupéry

Life has meaning only if one barters it day by day for something other than itself.

~ Antoine De Saint-Exupéry