Antoine De Saint-Exupéry Quotes

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

~ Antoine De Saint-Exupéry

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

~ Antoine De Saint-Exupéry

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.

~ Antoine De Saint-Exupéry

You're beautiful, but you're empty...One couldn't die for you. Of course, an ordinary passerby would think my rose looked just like you. But my rose, all on her own, is more important than all of you together, since she's the one I've watered. Since she's the one I put under glass, since she's the one I sheltered behind the screen. Since she's the one for whom I killed the caterpillars (except the two or three butterflies). Since she's the one I listened to when she complained, or when she boasted, or even sometimes when she said nothing at all. Since she's my rose.

~ Antoine De Saint-Exupéry

If you love a flower that lives on a star, it is sweet to look at the sky at night. All the stars are a-bloom with flowers...

~ Antoine De Saint-Exupéry

Love consists of not looking each other in the eye, but of looking outwardly in the same direction.

~ Antoine De Saint-Exupéry

Voici mon secret. Il est très simple: on ne voit bien qu'avec le cœur. L'essentiel est invisible pour les yeux.

~ Antoine De Saint-Exupéry

When someone blushes, doesn't that mean 'yes'?

~ Antoine De Saint-Exupéry

For millions of years flowers have been producing thorns. For millions of years sheep have been eating them all the same. And it's not serious, trying to understand why flowers go to such trouble to produce thorns that are good for nothing? It's not important, the war between the sheep and the flowers? It's no more serious and more important than the numbers that fat red gentleman is adding up? Suppose I happen to know a unique flower, one that exists nowhere in the world except on my planet, one that a little sheep can wipe out in a single bite one morning, just like that, without even realizing what he'd doing - that isn't important? If someone 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?

~ Antoine De Saint-Exupéry

Please-tame me!' he said.'I want to, very much,' the little prince replied. 'But I have not much time. I have friends to discover, and a great many things to understand.''One only understands the things that one tames,' said the fox. '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.''What must I do, to tame you?' asked the little prince.'You must be very patient,' replied the fox. 'First you will sit down at a little distance from me-like that-in the grass. I shall look at you out of the corner of my eye, and you will say nothing. Words are the source of misunderstandings. But you will sit a little closer to me, every day...

~ Antoine De Saint-Exupéry

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

No single event can awaken within us a stranger whose existence we had never suspected. To live is to be slowly born.

~ Antoine De Saint-Exupéry

That is the hardest thing of all. It is much harder to judge yourself than to judge others. If you succeed in judging yourself, it's because you're truly a wise man.

~ Antoine De Saint-Exupéry

You will have five hundred million little bells, and I shall have five hundred million springs of fresh water...

~ Antoine De Saint-Exupéry

What makes the desert beautiful,' said the little prince, 'is that somewhere it hides a well...

~ Antoine De Saint-Exupéry

The most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or touched, they are felt with the heart.

~ Antoine De Saint-Exupéry

I shall look at you out of the corner of my eye, and you will say nothing. Words are the source of misunderstandings.

~ Antoine De Saint-Exupéry

A goal without a plan is just a wish.

~ Antoine De Saint-Exupéry

I have no right to say or do anything that diminishes a man in his own eyes. What matters is not what I think of him but what he thinks of himself. Hurting a man in his dignity is a crime.

~ Antoine De Saint-Exupéry

I remembered the fox. One runs the risk of crying a bit if one allows oneself to be tamed.

~ Antoine De Saint-Exupéry

A rock pile ceases to be a rock pile the moment a single man contemplates it, bearing within him the image of a cathedral.

~ Antoine De Saint-Exupéry

If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work, and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.

~ Antoine De Saint-Exupéry

No one is ever satisfied where he is.

~ Antoine De Saint-Exupéry

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...

~ Antoine De Saint-Exupéry

And the fox said to the little prince: men have forgotten this truth, but you must not forget it. You become responsible, forever, for what you have tamed.

~ Antoine De Saint-Exupéry

Sometimes, there is no harm in putting off a piece of work until another day.

~ Antoine De Saint-Exupéry

I looked about me. Luminous points glowed in the darkness. Cigarettes punctuated the humble meditations of worn old clerks. I heard them talking to one another in murmurs and whispers. They talked about illness, money, shabby domestic cares. And suddenly I had a vision of the face of destiny. Old bureaucrat, my comrade, it is not you who are to blame. No one ever helped you to escape. You, like a termite, built your peace by blocking up with cement every chink and cranny through which the light might pierce. You rolled yourself up into a ball in your genteel security, in routine, in the stifling conventions of provincial life, raising a modest rampart against the winds and the tides and the stars. You have chosen not to be perturbed by great problems, having trouble enough to forget your own fate as a man. You are not the dweller upon an errant planet and do not ask yourself questions to which there are no answers. Nobody grasped you by the shoulder while there was still time. Now the clay of which you were shaped has dried and hardened, and naught in you will ever awaken the sleeping musician, the poet, the astronomer that possibly inhabited you in the beginning.

~ Antoine De Saint-Exupéry

Grown-ups never understand anything by themselves, and it is tiresome for children to be always and forever explaining things to them

~ Antoine De Saint-Exupéry

Well, I must endure the presence of a few caterpillars if I wish to become acquainted with the butterflies.

~ Antoine De Saint-Exupéry

Vivi muito tempo no mundo das pessoas grandes. Vi-as de bem perto.Não fiquei com muito melhor opinião delas.

~ Antoine De Saint-Exupéry

If you succeed in judging yourself rightly, then you are indeed a man of true wisdom.

~ Antoine De Saint-Exupéry

You are beautiful, but you are empty. 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. But in herself alone she is more important than all the hundreds of you other roses: because it is she that I have watered; because it is she that I have put under the glass globe; because it is she that I have sheltered behind the screen; because it is for her that I have killed the caterpillars; because it is she that I have listened to, when she grumbled, or bloated, or even sometimes when she said nothing. Because she is my rose.

~ Antoine De Saint-Exupéry

Action and personal happiness have no truck with each other, they are eternally at war.

~ Antoine De Saint-Exupéry

Mais, dans la mort d’un homme, un monde inconnu meurt, et je me demandais quelles étaient les images qui sombraient en lui.

~ Antoine De Saint-Exupéry

And now here is my secret, a very simple secret: It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.

~ Antoine De Saint-Exupéry

The only things you learn are the things you tame

~ Antoine De Saint-Exupéry

But if you come at just any time, I shall never know at what hour my heart is to be ready to greet you.

~ Antoine De Saint-Exupéry

Men have no more time to understand anything. They buy ready-made things in the shops. But since there are no shops where you can buy friends, men no longer have any friends.

~ Antoine De Saint-Exupéry

Only the unknown frightens men. But once a man has faced the unknown, that terror becomes the known.

~ Antoine De Saint-Exupéry

Quand tu veux construire un bateau, ne commence pas par rassembler du bois, couper des planches et distribuer du travail, mais reveille au sein des hommes le desir de la mer grande et large.If you want to build a ship, don't drum up people together 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