What makes the desert beautiful is that somewhere it hides a well
—Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Topics: Water
Grown-ups never understand anything for themselves, and it is tiresome for children to be always and forever explaining things to them.
—Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Topics: Children, Inner-child
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-Exupery
Topics: Dying, Death, Relationships, Friendship
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.
—Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Topics: Self-respect, Insults
The field of consciousness is tiny. It accepts only one problem at a time.
—Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Topics: Stress, Concentration, Focus
It is the time you have wasted for your rose that makes your rose so important.
—Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Topics: Value of a Day, Time Management
I know but one freedom and that is the freedom of the mind.
—Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Topics: Freedom
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 experiences and memories.
—Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Topics: Age
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-Exupery
Topics: Brothers, Humanity
Life always bursts the boundaries of formulas.
—Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Topics: Life
It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.
—Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Topics: Faith, Vision, Heart, Romance
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-Exupery
Topics: Commitment
More wisdom is latent in things as they are than in all the words men use.
—Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Topics: Wisdom
What saves a man is to take a step. Then another step.
—Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Topics: Humankind, Action, One Step at a Time
The friend within the man is that part of him which belongs to you and opens to you a door which never, perhaps, is opened to another. Such a friend is true, and all he says is true; and he loves you even if he hates you in other mansions of his heart.
—Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Topics: Friendship
Only the unknown frightens men. But once a man has faced the unknown, that terror becomes the known.
—Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Topics: Mystery
The meaning of things lies not in the things themselves, but in our attitude towards them.
—Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Topics: Meaning
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.
—Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Topics: Rationality, Perfect, Perfection, Achieve
When you give yourself, you receive more than you give.
—Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Topics: Giving, Charity
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-Exupery
Topics: Civilization
The machine does not isolate man from the great problems of nature but plunges him more deeply into them.
—Antoine de Saint-Exupery
A pile of rocks ceases to be a rock when somebody contemplates it with the idea of a cathedral in mind.
—Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Topics: Ideas
Are wars… anything but the means whereby a nation’s problems are set, where creation is stimulated—there you have adventure. But there is no adventure in heads-or-tails, in betting that the toss will come out of life or death. War is not an adventure. It is a disease. It is like typhus.
—Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Topics: War
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-Exupery
Topics: Charity
There is not growth except in the fulfillment of obligations.
—Antoine de Saint-Exupery
War is not an adventure. It is a disease. It is like typhus.
—Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Topics: Realistic Expectations
Life has taught us that love does not consist in gazing at each other but in looking outward together in the same direction.
—Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Topics: Life, Love, War, Togetherness, Romance
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.
—Antoine de Saint-Exupery
An administration, like a machine, does not create. It carries on.
—Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Topics: Government
There is no hope or joy except in human relations.
—Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Topics: Friendship, Hope, Joy
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
- Jean Giraudoux French Novelist, Playwright
- Norman Mailer American Novelist, Journalist
- Alexandre Dumas pere French Novelist, Playwright
- Jean Cocteau French Poet, Artist
- Marguerite Duras French Novelist, Playwright
- Andre Maurois French Novelist, Biographer
- Hector Bianciotti French Novelist
- Nathalie Sarraute French Novelist
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- Edward Hyde, 1st Earl of Clarendon English Statesman, Historian
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