Antoine de Saint-Exupéry Quotes

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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
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
So you, too, come from the sky! Which is your planet?

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

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
What makes the desert beautiful is that it hides, somewhere, a well.

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
The thing that is important is the thing that is not seen.

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
The dignity of the individual demands that he be not reduced to vassalage by the largess of others.

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
He who bears in his heart a cathedral to be built is already victorious.

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
For you live not by things, but by the meaning of things.

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
If you want to understand the meaning of happiness, you must see it as a reward and not as a goal.

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
A man's age represents a fine cargo of experiences and memories.

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
Although human life is priceless, we always act as if something had an even greater price than life.... But what is that something?

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
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.

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
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.

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
It is another of the miraculous things about mankind that there is no pain nor passion that does not radiate to the ends of the earth. Let a man in a garret but burn with enough intensity and he will set fire to the world.

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
The meaning of things lies not in the things themselves but in our attitude toward them.

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
A chief is a man who assumes responsibility. He says, 'I was beaten.' He does not say, 'My men were beaten.'

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
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