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Action(s)
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What saves a man is to take a step. Then another step.
-Antoine De Saint-Exupery
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Belief
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Of what worth are convictions that bring not suffering?
-Antoine De Saint-Exupery
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Charity
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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-Exupery
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When you give yourself, you receive more than you give.
-Antoine De Saint-Exupery
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Children
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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, The Little Prince, 1943
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Civilization
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A civilization is built on what is required of men, not on that which is provided for them.
-Antoine De Saint-Exupery
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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
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Death
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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
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Defeat
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Commonly, people believe that defeat is characterized by a general bustle and a feverish rush. Bustle and rush are the signs of victory, not of defeat. Victory is a thing of action. It is a house in the act of being built. Every participant in victory sweats and puffs, carrying the stones for the building of the house. But defeat is a thing of weariness, of incoherence, of boredom. And above all of futility.
-Antoine De Saint-Exupery
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Differences
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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.
(published in New York)http://freefeel.org/wiki/AGuideForGrownUps
-Antoine De Saint-Exupery, Flight to Arras (Pilote De Guerre), 1942
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Discovery
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How could drops of water know themselves to be a river? Yet the river flows on.
-Antoine De Saint-Exupery
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Escape, Escapism
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There is a cheap literature that speaks to us of the need of escape. It is true that when we travel we are in search of distance. But distance is not to be found. It melts away. And escape has never led anywhere. The moment a man finds that he must play the races, go the Arctic, or make war in order to feel himself alive, that man has begin to spin the strands that bind him to other men and to the world. But what wretched strands! A civilization that is really strong fills man to the brim, though he never stir. What are we worth when motionless, is the question.
-Antoine De Saint-Exupery
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Failure
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The injustice of defeat lies in the fact that its most innocent victims are made to look like heartless accomplices. It is impossible to see behind defeat, the sacrifices, the austere performance of duty, the self-discipline and the vigilance that are there
-Antoine De Saint-Exupery, Flight to Arras, ch. 15, 1942
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Flight, Flying
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The aeroplane has unveiled for us the true face of the earth.
-Antoine De Saint-Exupery
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Freedom
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I know but one freedom and that is the freedom of the mind.
-Antoine De Saint-Exupery
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Funerals
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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
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Happiness
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It is in the compelling zest of high adventure and of victory, and in creative action, that man finds his supreme joys.
-Antoine De Saint-Exupery
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True happiness comes from the joy of deeds well done, the zest of creating things new.
-Antoine De Saint-Exupery
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Heart
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And now here is my secret, a very simple secret; it is only with the heart that one can see rightly, what is essential is invisible to the eye.
-Antoine De Saint-Exupery
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Humanity
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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
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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-Exupery
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Ideas
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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
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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-Exupery
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Insults
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I have no right to say or do anything that diminishes a man in his own eyes. What matters is not what I think of him, but what he thinks of himself. Hurting a man in his dignity is a crime.
-Antoine De Saint-Exupery
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Liberty
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What do we mean by setting a man free? You cannot free a man who dwells in a desert and is an unfeeling brute. 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-Exupery
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Books by and about Antoine De Saint-Exupery