Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Antoine Marie Jean-Baptiste Roger, comte de Saint-Exupérywas a French writer, poet, aristocrat, journalist, and pioneering aviator. He became a laureate of several of France's highest literary awards and also won the U.S. National Book Award. He is best remembered for his novella The Little Princeand for his lyrical aviation writings, including Wind, Sand and Stars and Night Flight...
NationalityFrench
ProfessionPoet
Date of Birth29 June 1900
CityLyon, France
CountryFrance
That's the way they are. You must not hold it against them. Children should be very understanding of grown-ups.
"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 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.
How could drops of water know themselves to be a river? Yet the river flows on.
To grasp the meaning of the world of today we use a language created to express the world of yesterday. The life of the past seems to us nearer our true natures, but only for the reason that it is nearer our language.
Freedom and constraint are two aspects of the same necessity, which is to be what one is and no other.
The one thing that matters is the effort.
You're beautiful, but you're empty...One couldn't die for you. Of course, an ordinary passerby would think my rose looked just like you. But my rose, all on her own, is more important than all of you together, since she's the one I've watered. Since she's the one I put under glass, since she's the one I sheltered behind the screen. Since she's the one for whom I killed the caterpillars (except the two or three butterflies). Since she's the one I listened to when she complained, or when she boasted, or even sometimes when she said nothing at all. Since she's my rose.
One must require from each one the duty which each one can perform. Accepted authority rests first of all on reason.
In giving you are throwing a bridge across the chasm of your solitude.
Grown-ups never understand anything for themselves, and it is tiresome for children to be always and forever explaining things to them.
One runs the risk of weeping a little, if one lets himself be tamed.
When you want to build a ship, then do not drum the men together in order to procure wood, to give instructions or to distribute the work, but teach them longing for the wide endless sea.
You give birth to that on which you fix your mind