135 Inspiring Quotes by Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Welcome to our collection of quotes (with shareable picture quotes) by Antoine de Saint-Exupery. We hope you enjoy pondering them and that you will share them widely.
Wikipedia Summary for Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
Antoine Marie Jean-Baptiste Roger, comte de Saint-Exupéry, simply known as de Saint-Exupéry (UK: , US: , French: [ɑ̃twan də sɛ̃t‿ɛɡzypeʁi]; 29 June 1900 – 31 July 1944), was a French writer, poet, aristocrat, journalist and pioneering aviator. He became a laureate of several of France's highest literary awards and also won the United States National Book Award. He is best remembered for his novella The Little Prince (Le Petit Prince) and for his lyrical aviation writings, including Wind, Sand and Stars and Night Flight.
Saint-Exupéry was a successful commercial pilot before World War II, working airmail routes in Europe, Africa, and South America. He joined the French Air Force at the start of the war, flying reconnaissance missions until France's armistice with Germany in 1940. After being demobilised from the French Air Force, he travelled to the United States to help persuade its government to enter the war against Nazi Germany.
Saint-Exupéry spent 28 months in America, during which he wrote three of his most important works, then joined the Free French Air Force in North Africa—although he was far past the maximum age for such pilots and in declining health. He disappeared and is believed to have died while on a reconnaissance mission from Corsica over the Mediterranean on 31 July 1944.
Prior to the war, Saint-Exupéry had achieved fame in France as an aviator. His literary works posthumously boosted his stature to national hero status in France, including The Little Prince which has been translated into 300 languages. He earned further widespread recognition with international translations of his other works. His 1939 philosophical memoir Terre des hommes (titled Wind, Sand and Stars in English) became the name of an international humanitarian group; it was also used as the central theme of Expo 67 in Montreal, Quebec. His birthplace of Lyon also named its main airport after him.

The friend within the man is that part of him which belongs to you and opens to you a door which never, perhaps, is opened to another. Such a friend is true, and all he says is true; and he loves you even if he hates you in other mansions of his heart.
The arms of love encompass you with your present, your past, your future, the arms of love gather you together.
It is in the compelling zest of high adventure and of victory, and in creative action, that man finds his supreme joys.
A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.

It was the contemplation of God that created men who were equal, for it was in God that they were equal.

And that heart which was a wild garden was given to him who only loved trim lawns. And the imbecile carried the princess into slavery.

But games always cover something deep and intense, else there would be no excitement in them, no pleasure, no power to stir us.

It is not a question of living dangerously. That formula is too arrogant, too presumptuous. I don't care much for bull-fighters. It's not the danger I love. I know what I love. It is life itself.

If France is to be judged, judge her not by the effects of her defeat but by her readiness to sacrifice herself.

Only the children know what they are looking for.
Longer Version/[Notes]:
Only the children know what they are looking for. They waste their time over a rag doll and it becomes very important to them; and if anybody takes it away from them, they cry.

Good taste is a virtue of the keepers of museums. If you scorn bad taste, you will have neither painting nor dancing, neither palaces nor gardens.

Once we are bound together to our brothers by a common good that is outside us, then we can breathe. Experience teaches us that love is not to gaze at one another but to gaze in the same direction. There is no comradeship except through unity on the same rope, climbing towards the same peak.

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.

Peace dies when the framework is ripped apart. When there is no longer a place that is yours in the world. When you know no longer where your friend is to be found.

Mad is the man who is forever gritting his teeth against that granite block, complete and changeless, of the past.

Nothing can match the treasure of common memories.
Longer Version/[Notes]:
Nothing can match the treasure of common memories, of trials endured together, of quarrels and reconciliations and generous emotions. It is idle, having planted an acorn in the morning, to expect that afternoon to sit in the shade of the oak.

The flower you single out is a rejection of all other flowers; nevertheless, only on these terms is it beautiful.

The magic of the craft has opened for me a world in which I shall confront, within two hours, the black dragons and the crowned crests of a coma of blue lightnings, and when night has fallen I, delivered, shall read my course in the starts.

Demagoguery enters at the moment when, for want of a common denominator, the principle of equality degenerates into the principle of identity.

If I had fifty-three minutes to spend as I liked, I should walk at my leisure toward a spring of fresh water.

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

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.

Navigating by the compass in a sea of clouds over Spain is all very well, it is very dashing, but -- you want to remember that below the sea of clouds lies eternity.

I don't believe you! Flowers are weak creatures. They are naive. They reassure themselves as best they can. They believe that their thorns are terrible weapons.

We live not by things, but by the meaning of things. It is needful to transmit the passwords from generation to generation.

If you want to build a boat, do not instruct the men to saw wood, stitch the sails, prepare the tools and organize the work, but make them long for setting sail and travel to distant lands.

One day, I watched the sun setting forty-four times......You know...when one is so terribly sad, one loves sunsets.

What do we mean by setting a man free? You cannot free a man who dwells in a desert and is an unfeeling brute.

If you tame me, it would be as if the sun came to shine on my life.
Longer Version/[Notes]:
If you tame me, then we shall need each other. To me, you will be unique in all the world. To you, I shall be unique in all the world…if you tame me, it will be as if the sun came to shine on my life. I shall know the sound of a step that will be different from all the others. Other steps send me hurrying back underneath the ground. Yours will call me, like music, out of my burrow.

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 asronomer that possibly inhabited you in the beginning.

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.

The dignity of the individual demands that he be not reduced to vassalage by the largesse of others.

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.

For there is but one problem -- the problem of human relations. We forget that there is no hope or joy except in human relations.

It is only with the heart that one can see rightly.
Longer Version/[Notes]:
It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.

Behind all seen things lies something vaster; everything is but a path, a portal or a window opening on something other than itself.

What place would you advise me to visit now? he asked. The planet Earth, replied the geographer. It has a good reputation.

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.

Nothing comes of severity if there be no leanings towards a change of heart. And if there be natural leanings towards a change of heart, what need for severity?

If I were to command a general to turn into a seagull, and if the general did not obey, that would not be the general's fault. It would be mine.

True, it is evil that a single man should crush the herd, but see not there the worse form of slavery, which is when the herd crushes out the man.

The Beauty of the Mountain is hidden for all those who try to discover it from the top, supposing that, one way or an other, one can reach this place directly. The Beauty of the Mountain reveals only to those who climbed it.

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.

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.

The strong are strengthened by reverses; the trouble is that the true meaning of events scores next to nothing in the match we play with men. Appearances decide our gains or losses and the points are trumpery. And a mere semblance of defeat may hopelessly checkmate us.

Look at the sky. Ask yourselves: Has the sheep eaten the flower, yes or no? And you will see how everything changes.

Water, thou hast no taste, no color, no odor; canst not be defined, art relished while ever mysterious. Not necessary to life, but rather life itself, thou fillest us with a gratification that exceeds the delight of the senses.

If you are to be, you must begin by assuming responsibility. You alone are responsible for every moment of your life, for every one of your acts.

We are prudent people. We are afraid to let go of our petty reality in order to grasp at a great shadow.

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

You do not explain the tree by telling of the water it has drunk, the minerals it has absorbed, and the sunlight that strengthened it.

I will appoint captains to rule my cities, for it is in the compelling zest of high adventure and of victory, and in creative action, that man finds his supreme joys.

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.

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.

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

We say nothing essential about the cathedral when we speak of its stones. We say nothing essential about Man when we seek to define him by the qualities of men.

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.

Men have forgotten this truth, said the fox. But you must not forget it. You become responsible, forever, for what you have tamed.

A smile is often the key thing.One is paid with a smile. One is rewarded with a smile. One is brightened by a smile. And the quality of a smile can make one die.

Only he can understand what a farm is, what a country is, who shall have sacrificed part of himself to his farm or country, fought to save it, struggled to make it beautiful. Only then will the love of farm or country fill his heart.

The notion of looking on at life has always been hateful to me. What am I if I am not a participant? In order to be, I must participate.

What saves a man is to take a step. Then another step. It is always the same step, but you have to take it.

The one thing that matters is the effort.
Longer Version/[Notes]:
The one thing that matters is the effort. It continues, whereas the end to be attained is but an illusion of the climber, as he fares on and on from crest to crest; and once the goal is reached it has no meaning.

Transport of the mails, transport of the human voice, transport of flickering pictures-in this century as in others our highest accomplishments still have the single aim of bringing men together.

No single event can awaken within us a stranger totally unknown to us. To live is to be slowly born. It would be a bit too easy if we could go about borrowing ready-made souls.

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

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.

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

For true love is inexhaustible; the more you give, the more you have. And if you go to draw at the true fountainhead, the more water you draw, the more abundant is its flow.

Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.
Longer Version/[Notes]:
Perfection is finally attained not when there is no longer anything to add, but when there is no longer anything to take away, when a body has been stripped down to its nakedness.
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