Quotes about Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

9 Sourced Quotes

Antoine St. Exupéry once mourned the loss of a man and the secret treasures that he held inside him. I loved Exupéry; I will read him again, and he will talk to me, not being dead, or gone. Is that life after death — mind living on paper and flesh living in offspring? Maybe. I do not know.

Sylvia Plath
Sylvia Plath
Saint-Exupéry is a master at describing not so much the beauty of the desert as the state of mind evoked by its desolation. You feel connected to the earth in the Sahara. [...] [His] evocative descriptions leave you wanting but one thing before you die: to spend one night beneath the starry Saharan sky.

Saint-Exupéry's work romanticizes not only nature but also people; he seems to have wholeheartedly endorsed the idea of the noble savage, man not yet corrupted by civilization.

Tarfaya is an insignificant little town where the sand blows through unpaved streets. There is one restaurant and no hotel. Although Saint-Exupéry is by far the most famous resident the town has ever known, his name doesn't mean anything to anyone here.

Saint-Exupéry is perhaps the writer who has most clearly (certainly most accessibly) expressed a philosophy of moral realism, which perhaps accounts for his enormous influence on the post-war generation in France (and his failure to make a like impression on the flabby moral tissue of the post-war generation in Great Britain and the United States).

Herbert Read
Herbert Read
The work of Saint-Exupéry is not an argument. It is an example.

The journey of Saint-Exupéry is back towards his starting point. We cherish secure happiness, the happiness of childhood, but discover that we must leave childhood whether we want to do so or not. We are therefore launched into Valéry's 'ère successive', where salvation is to be found in action.

We are fragments, says Saint-Exupéry, of a great construction, which we shall need more time, more silence and more perspective to discover. Intelligence is capable of manipulating a situation, but not of evaluating it.

The idea of unified substance emerges from Saint-Exupéry's writings. Man is not a collection of acts, but the meaningful sum of them.