Antoine de Saint-Exupéry Quotes

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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
Here is my secret. It is very simple. It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; What is essential is invisible to the eye.

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing more to take away.

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
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
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
An administration, like a machine, does not create. It carries on.

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
This asteroid has only once been seen through the telescope. That was by a Turkish astronomer, in 1909. On making his discovery, the astronomer had presented it to the International Astronomical Congress, in a great demonstration. But he was in Turkish costume, and so nobody would believe what he said.

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
To give you an idea of the size of the Earth, I will tell you that before the invention of electricity it was necessary to maintain, over the whole of the six continents, a veritable army of 462,511 lamplighters for the street lamps.

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
A child is not frightened at the thought of being patiently transmuted into an old man.

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
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.

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
Lisbon seemed like a sort of bright, wistful paradise...

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
Real miracles make little noise! Essential events are so simple!

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
How does life construct those lines of force which make us alive?

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
The essential, most often, has no weight. The essential there, was apparently nothing but a smile. A smile is often the essential. One is paid with a smile. One is rewarded by a smile. And the quality of a smile might make one die.

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
Confuse not love with the raptures of possession, which bring the cruellest of sufferings. For, notwithstanding the general opinion, love does not cause suffering: what causes it is the sense of ownership, which is love's opposite.

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
In giving, you throw a bridge across the chasm of your solitude.

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
The field of consciousness is tiny. It accepts only one problem at a time. Get into a fist fight, put your mind on the strategy of the fight, and you will not feel the other fellow's punches.

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
And it was at that moment that you pronounced your first intelligible sentence, a speech admirable in its human pride: "I swear that what I went through, no animal would have gone through."

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

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

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
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.

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
"I swear that what I went through, no animal would have gone through." This sentence, the noblest ever spoken, this sentence that defines man's place in the universe, that honors him, that re-establishes the true hierarchy, floated back into my thoughts.

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry