Antoine de Saint Exupéry quotes - page 6

Antoine de Saint Exupéry was a French writer and pioneering aviator, best known as the author of "The Little Prince." His adventurous spirit and poetic prose have touched generations of readers around the world. He remains celebrated for his profound reflections on humanity, friendship, and the meaning of life. Here are 149 of his quotes:

It is as a soldier that you make love and as a lover that you make war.

Antoine de Saint Exupéry

How could drops of water know themselves to be a river Yet the river flows on.

Antoine de Saint Exupéry

Freedom and constraint are two aspects of the same necessity, which is to be what one is and no other.

Antoine de Saint Exupéry

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

Antoine de Saint Exupéry

On a day of burial there is no perspective -- for space itself is annihilated. Your dead friend is still a fragmentary being. The day you bury him is a day of chores and crowds, of hands false or true to be shaken, of the immediate cares of mourning. The dead friend will not really die until tomorrow, when silence is round you again. Then he will show himself complete, as he was -- to tear himself away, as he was, from the substantial you. Only then will you cry out because of him who is leaving and whom you cannot detain.

Antoine de Saint Exupéry

There is no hope of joy except in human relations.

Antoine de Saint Exupéry

There is a cheap literature that speaks to us of the need of escape. It is true that when we travel we are in search of distance. But distance is not to be found. It melts away. And escape has never led anywhere. The moment a man finds that he must play the races, go the Arctic, or make war in order to feel himself alive, that man has begin to spin the strands that bind him to other men and to the world. But what wretched strands A civilization that is really strong fills man to the brim, though he never stir. What are we worth when motionless, is the question.

Antoine de Saint Exupéry

And the little prince broke into a lovely peal of laughter, which irritated me very much. I like my misfortunes to be taken seriously.

Antoine de Saint Exupéry

But certainly, for us who understand life, figures are a matter of indifference.

Antoine de Saint Exupéry

Where I live, everything is very small.

Antoine de Saint Exupéry

You know...my flower...I'm responsible for her. And she's so weak! And so naive. She has four ridiculous thorns to defend her against the world...

Antoine de Saint Exupéry

But if you tame me, my life will be filled with sunshine. I'll know the sound of footsteps that will be different from all the rest. Others send me back underground. Yours will call me out of my burrow like music.

Antoine de Saint Exupéry

You see, one loves the sunset when one is so sad.

Antoine de Saint Exupéry

The only things you learn are the things you tame.

Antoine de Saint Exupéry

For, to conceited men, all other men are admirers.

Antoine de Saint Exupéry

The proof that the little prince existed is that he was charming, that he laughed, and that he was looking for a sheep. If anybody wants a sheep, that is a proof that he exists.

Antoine de Saint Exupéry

Grown ups are certainly very strange.

Antoine de Saint Exupéry

He had taken seriously words which were without importance, and it made him very unhappy.

Antoine de Saint Exupéry

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...

Antoine de Saint Exupéry

Have you looked at a modern airplane? Have you followed from year to year the evolution of its lines? Have you ever thought, not only about the airplane but about whatever man builds, that all of man's industrial efforts, all his computations and calculations, all the nights spent over working draughts and blueprints, invariably culminate in the production of a thing whose sole and guiding principle is the ultimate principle of simplicity? It is as if there were a natural law which ordained that to achieve this end, to refine the curve of a piece of furniture, or a ship's keel, or the fuselage of an airplane, until gradually it partakes of the elementary purity of the curve of a human breast or shoulder, there must be the experimentation of several generations of craftsmen. In anything at all, 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.

Antoine de Saint Exupéry

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. Do our dreamers hold that the invention of writing, of printing, of the sailing ship, degraded the human spirit? It seems to me that those who complain of man's progress confuse ends with means. True, that man who struggles in the unique hope of material gain will harvest nothing worth while. But how can anyone conceive that the machine is an end? It is a tool. As much a tool as is the plough. The microscope is a tool. What disservice do we do the life of the spirit when we analyze the universe through a tool created by the science of optics, or seek to bring together those who love one another and are parted in space?

Antoine de Saint Exupéry