50 Quotes by Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Antoine de Saint-Exupery is a French writer and aviator who is best known for his novella "The Little Prince". Saint-Exupery was a pioneer of commercial aviation and worked as a mail pilot in North Africa and South America. He also wrote several books about his experiences as a pilot, including "Night Flight" and "Wind, Sand and Stars". "The Little Prince" is his most famous work and has been translated into over 300 languages. The novella is a poetic and philosophical tale about a young prince who travels from planet to planet, learning about life and love along the way. Saint-Exupery disappeared during a reconnaissance mission in 1944 and was presumed dead. (Bio)
Antoine de Saint-Exupery Quotes
Let your dream devour your life, not your life devour your dream. (Meaning)
As for the future, your task is not to foresee it, but to enable it. (Quote Meaning)
Real love begins where nothing is expected in return. (Meaning)
Make your life a dream, and a dream a reality. (Quote Meaning)
True love is inexhaustible; the more you give, the more you have. (Meaning)
I know but one freedom and that is the freedom of the mind. (Quote Meaning)
To be a man is, precisely, to be responsible. (Meaning)
The essential things in life are seen, not with the eyes but with the heart. (Quote Meaning)
True love begins when nothing is looked for in return. (Meaning)
Perfection is not when there is no more to add, but no more to take away. (Quote Meaning)
When you give yourself, you receive more than you give. (Meaning)
To love is not to look at one another: it is to look, together, in the same direction. (Quote Meaning)
It is much more difficult to judge oneself than to judge others. (Meaning)
To live is to be slowly born. (Quote Meaning)
One runs the risk of weeping a little, if one lets himself be tamed. (Meaning)
It is such a secret place, the land of tears. (Quote Meaning)
Pure logic is the ruin of the spirit. (Meaning)
I am who I am and I have the need to be. (Quote Meaning)
The thing that is important is the thing that is not seen. (Meaning)
You risk tears if you let yourself be tamed. (Quote Meaning)
Night, when words fade and things come alive. (Meaning)
It is only with the heart that one can see rightly. (Quote Meaning)
A sky as pure as water bathed the stars and brought them out. (Meaning)
Sorrow is one of the vibrations that prove the fact of living. (Quote Meaning)
I was too young to know how to love her. (Meaning)
The only things you learn are the things you tame (Quote Meaning)
No one is ever satisfied where he is. (Meaning)
Sometimes, there is no harm in putting off a piece of work until another day. (Quote Meaning)
You see, one loves the sunset when one is so sad. (Meaning)
For, to conceited men, all other men are admirers. (Quote Meaning)
When one wishes to play the wit, he sometimes wander a little from the truth. (Meaning)
I saw the sunset forty-four times! (Quote Meaning)
Straight ahead you can't go very far. (Meaning)
He who must travel happily must travel light. (Quote Meaning)
When a mystery is too overpowering, one dare not disobey. (Meaning)
One must observe the proper rites. (Quote Meaning)
Grown ups are certainly very strange. (Meaning)
Only the children know what they are looking for. (Quote Meaning)
Love does not consist in gazing at each other, but in looking outward together in the same direction. (Meaning)
If you want to build a ship, don't summon people to buy wood, prepare tools, distribute jobs, and organize the work; teach people the yearning for the wide, boundless ocean. (Quote Meaning)
Let your dream devour your life, not your life devour your dream.
Of course I’ll hurt you. Of course you’ll hurt me. Of course we will hurt each other. But this is the very condition of existence. To become spring, means accepting the risk of winter. To become presence, means accepting the risk of absence.
Perfection is attained, not when no more can be added, but when no more can be removed.
Attitude is a paintbrush. It colors everything!
What makes the desert beautiful is that somewhere it hides a well.
You - you alone will have the stars as no one else has them...In one of the stars I shall be living. In one of them I shall be laughing. And so it will be as if all the stars were laughing, when you look at the sky at night...You - only you - will have stars that can laugh.
Nothing can match the treasure of common memories, of trials endured together, of quarrels and reconciliations and generous emotions. It is idle, having planted an acorn in the morning, to expect that afternoon to sit in the shade of the oak.
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.
There is nothing that can equal the treasure of so many shared memories.
Love does not cause suffering: what causes it is the sense of ownership, which is love's opposite.
The meaning of things lies not in the things themselves, but in our attitude towards them.
All grown-ups were once children... but only few of them remember it.
It is the time you have wasted for your rose that makes your rose so important.
You cannot plant an acorn in the morning, and expect that afternoon to sit in the shade of an oak.
Language is the source of misunderstandings.
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.
Tell me who admires and loves you, and I will tell you who you are.
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.
Behind all seen things lies something vaster; everything is but a path, a portal or a window opening on something other than iteself.
I have no right, by anything I do or say, to demean a human being in his own eyes. What matters is not what I think of him; it is what he thinks of himself. To undermine a man's self-respect is a sin.
The tender friendships one gives up, on parting, leave their bite on the heart, but also a curious feeling of a treasure somewhere buried.
One runs the risk of weeping a little, if one lets himself be tamed.
True happiness comes from the joy of deeds well done, the zest of creating things new.
True love begins when nothing is looked for in return.
A single event can awaken within us a stranger totally unknown to us.
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 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.
One's suffering disappears when one lets oneself go, when one yields - even to sadness.
It is in your act that you exist, not in your body. Your act is yourself, and there is no other you.
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.
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.
Once you are my friend, I am responsible for you.
Sometimes we behave as though there was something more important than life. But what?
Of course, I love you,' the flower said to him. 'If you were not aware of it, it was my fault.
It is always in the midst, in the epicenter, of your troubles that you find serenity.
It's quite simple: One sees clearly only with the heart. Anything essential is invisible to the eyes.
To live is to be slowly born.
It is such a secret place, the land of tears.
You become responsible, forever, for what you have tamed.
Life always bursts the boundaries of formulas.
The essential things in life are seen, not with the eyes but with the heart.
Friendship is born from an identity of spiritual goals - from common navigation toward a star.
It is much more difficult to judge oneself than to judge others.
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
Experience will guide us to the rules. You cannot make rules precede practical experience.
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.
Truths may clash without contradicting each other.
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.
For true love is inexhaustible; the more you give, the more you have. And if you go to draw at the true fountainhead, the more water you draw, the more abundant is its flow.
I have always learned to distinguish the important from the urgent.
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.
And at night I love to listen to the stars. It is like five hundred million little bells.
― Antoine de Saint-Exupery Quotes
Chief Editor
Tal Gur is an author, founder, and impact-driven entrepreneur at heart. After trading his daily grind for a life of his own daring design, he spent a decade pursuing 100 major life goals around the globe. His journey and most recent book, The Art of Fully Living, has led him to found Elevate Society.
