Antoine de Saint-Exupéry Quotes

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It seems that perfection is attained not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing more to remove.

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
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.

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
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.

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
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
Experience shows us that love does not consist in gazing at each other but in looking together in the same direction.

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.

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
If it is true that wars are won by believers, it is also true that peace treaties are sometimes signed by businessmen.

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
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.

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
One can be a brother only in something. Where there is no tie that binds men, men are not united but merely lined up.

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
In a civil war the firing line is invisible, it passes through the hearts of men.

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
The aeroplane has unveiled for us the true face of the earth.

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
The machine does not isolate us from the great problems of nature but plunges us more deeply into them.

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
The injustice of defeat lies in the fact that its most innocent victims are made to look like heartless accomplices.

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
Your task is not to foresee the future, but to enable it.

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
There is no liberty except the liberty of some one making his way towards something. Such a man can be set free if you will teach him the meaning of thirst, and how to trace a path to a well. Only then will he embark upon a course of action that will not be without significance. You could not liberate a stone if there were no law of gravity - for where will the stone go, once it is quarried?

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
To be a man is to be responsible: to be ashamed of miseries you did not cause; to be proud of your comrades' victories; to be aware, when setting one stone, that you are building a world.

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry