Antoine de Saint-Exupéry - Flight to Arras (1942)

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

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
An administration, like a machine, does not create. It carries on.

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
A child is not frightened at the thought of being patiently transmuted into an old man.

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
Treason implies responsibility for something, control over something, influence upon something, knowledge of something. Treason in our time is a proof of genius. Why, I want to know, are not traitors decorated?

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
Peace dies when the framework is ripped apart. When there is no longer a place that is yours in the world. When you know no longer where your friend is to be found.

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
The seed haunted by the sun never fails to find its way between the stones in the ground. And the pure logician, if no sun draws him forth, remains entangled in his logic.

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
Life always bursts the boundaries of formulas. Defeat may prove to have been the only path to resurrection, despite its ugliness. I take it for granted that to create a tree I condemn a seed to rot. If the first act of resistance comes too late it is doomed to defeat. But it is, nevertheless, the awakening of resistance. Life may grow from it as from a seed.

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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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 chief is a man who assumes responsibility. He says, 'I was beaten.' He does not say, 'My men were beaten.'

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
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
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
He who bears in his heart a cathedral to be built is already victorious.

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