Top 366 Quotes & Sayings by Antoine de Saint-Exupery - Page 2

It is in your act that you exist, not in your body. Your act is yourself, and there is no other you.

It is the time you have wasted for your rose that makes your rose so important.

It's quite simple: One sees clearly only with the heart. Anything essential is invisible to the eyes. [Fr., Il est tres simple: on ne voit bien qu'avec le coeur. L'essentiel est invisible pour les yeux.]

A goal without a pan is just a wish.

I fly because it releases my mind from the tyranny of petty things.

True love begins when nothing is looked for in return.

It is always in the midst, in the epicenter, of your troubles that you find serenity.

Sometimes we behave as though there was something more important than life. But what?

When one is building a ship, one does not begin with gathering timber and cutting planks, but rather by arousing in people the yearning for the great wide sea.

You know you've achieved perfection in design, not when you have nothing more to add, but when you have nothing more to take away.

The essential things in life are seen, not with the eyes but with the heart.

Language is the source of misunderstandings.

The tree is more than first a seed, then a stem, then a living trunk, and then dead timber. The tree is a slow, enduring force straining to win the sky.

A single event can awaken within us a stranger totally unknown to us.

In every crowd are certain persons who seem just like the rest, yet they bear amazing messages.

If you are to be, you must begin by assuming responsibility. You alone are responsible for every moment of your life, for every one of your acts.

We live not by things, but by the meaning of things. It is needful to transmit the passwords from generation to generation.

The tender friendships one gives up, on parting, leave their bite on the heart, but also a curious feeling of a treasure somewhere buried.

To live is to be slowly born.

All grown-ups were once children... but only few of them remember it.

To be a man is, precisely, to be responsible. It is to feel shame at the sight of what seems to be unmerited misery. It is to take pride in a victory won by one's comrades. It is to feel, when setting one's stone, that one is contributing to the building of the world.

I know but one freedom and that is the freedom of the mind.

GOOD MORNING," said the little prince. "Good Morning," said the salesclerk. This was a salesclerk who sold pills invented to quench thirst. Swallow one a week and you no longer feel any need to drink. "Why do you sell these pills?" "They save so much time," the salesclerk said. "Experts have calculated that you can save fifty-three minutes a week." "And what do you do with those fifty-three minutes?" "Whatever you like." "If I had fifty-three minutes to spend as I liked," the little prince said to himself, "I'd walk very slowly toward a water fountain.

One only really sees with the heart.

A man's age is something impressive, it sums up his life: maturity reached slowly and against many obstacles, illnesses cured, griefs and despairs overcome, and unconscious risks taken; maturity formed through so many desires, hopes, regrets, forgotten things, loves. A man's age represents a fine cargo of experience and memories.

Behind all seen things lies something vaster; everything is but a path, a portal or a window opening on something other than iteself.

Friendship is born from an identity of spiritual goals - from common navigation toward a star.

The important thing is to strive toward a goal which is not immediately visible. That goal is not the concern of the mind, but of the spirit.

Life always bursts the boundaries of formulas.

And when your sorrow is comforted (time soothes all sorrows) you will be content that you have known me. You will always be my friend. You will want to laugh with me. And you will sometimes open your window, so, for that pleasure . . . And your friends will be properly astonished to see you laughing as you look up at the sky! Then you will say to them, 'Yes, the stars always make me laugh!' And they will think you are crazy. It will be a very shabby trick that I shall have played on you.

Once you are my friend, I am responsible for you.

Well, I must endure the presence of a few caterpillars if I wish to become acquainted with the butterflies.

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.

Pure logic is the ruin of the spirit.

Truth is not that which is demonstrable but that which is ineluctable.

You'll be bothered from time to time by storms, fog, snow. When you are, think of those who went through it before you, and say to yourself, 'What they could do, I can do.'

But eyes are blind. You have to look with the heart.

The Beauty of the Mountain is hidden for all those who try to discover it from the top, supposing that, one way or an other, one can reach this place directly. The Beauty of the Mountain reveals only to those who climbed it.

A pilot's business is with the wind, and with the stars, with night, with sand, with the sea. He strives to outwit the forces of nature. He stares with expectancy for the coming of the dawn the way a gardener awaits the coming of spring. He looks forward to port as a promised land, and truth for him is what lives in the stars.

If you tame me, then we shall need each other. To me, you will be unique in all the world. To you, I shall be unique in all the world…if you tame me, it will be as if the sun came to shine on my life. I shall know the sound of a step that will be different from all the others. Other steps send me hurrying back underneath the ground. Yours will call me, like music, out of my burrow

One's suffering disappears when one lets oneself go, when one yields - even to sadness.

You cannot plant an acorn in the morning, and expect that afternoon to sit in the shade of an oak.

One runs the risk of weeping a little, if one lets himself be tamed.

Experience will guide us to the rules. You cannot make rules precede practical experience.

Love does not cause suffering: what causes it is the sense of ownership, which is love's opposite.

You give birth to that on which you fix your mind

For there is but one problem - the problem of human relations. We forget that there is no hope or joy except in human relations.

I am very fond of sunsets. Come, let us go look at a sunset.

The arms of love encompass you with your present, your past, your future, the arms of love gather you together.

All men have the stars," he answered, "but they are not the same things for different people. For some, who are travellers, the stars are guides. For others they are no more than little lights in the sky. For others, who are scholars, they are problems. For my businessman they were wealth. But all the stars are silent. You--you alone--will have the stars as no one else has them--

He who never says "no" is no true man.

On a day of burial there is no perspective--for space itself is annihilated. Your dead friend is still a fragmentary being. The day you bury him is a day of chores and crowds, of hands false or true to be shaken, of the immediate cares of mourning. The dead friend will not really die until tomorrow, when silence is round you again. Then he will show himself complete, as he was--to tear himself away, as he was, from the substantial you. Only then will you cry out because of him who is leaving and whom you cannot detain.

Demagoguery enters at the moment when, for want of a common denominator, the principle of equality degenerates into the principle of identity.

If you love a flower that lives on a star, it is sweet to look at the sky at night. All the stars are a-bloom with flowers.

And at night I love to listen to the stars. It is like five hundred million little bells.

Of course, I love you,' the flower said to him. 'If you were not aware of it, it was my fault.

"It's a question of discipline," the little prince told me later on. "When you've finished washing and dressing each morning, you must tend your planet."

There is nothing that can equal the treasure of so many shared memories.

I am who I am and I have the need to be.

Man is, above all, he who creates.