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
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.
When a mystery is too overpowering, one dare not disobey.
It was the contemplation of God that created men who were equal, for it was in God that they were equal.
The job has its grandeurs, yes. There is the exultation of arriving safely after a storm, the joy of gliding down out of the darkness of night or tempest toward a sun-drenched Alicante or Santiago; there is the swelling sense of returning to repossess one's place in life, in the miraculous garden of earth, where are trees and women and, down by the harbor, friendly little bars. When he has throttled his engine and is banking into the airport, leaving the somber cloud masses behind, what pilot does not break into song?
So the crew fly on with no thought that they are in motion. Like night over the sea, they are very far from the earth, from towns, from trees. The clock ticks on. The dials, the radio lamps, the various hands and needles go though their invisible alchemy. . . . and when the hour is at hand the pilot may glue his forehead to the window with perfect assurance. Out of oblivion the gold has been smelted: there it gleams in the lights of the airport.
The essential things in life are seen, not with the eyes but with the heart.
If a composer suffers from loss of sleep and his sleeplessness induces him to turn out masterpieces, what a profitable loss it is!
Men have no more time to understand anything. They buy things all ready made at the shops. But there is no shop anywhere where one can buy friendship, and so men have no friends any more. If you want a friend, tame me...
What sets men at variance is but the treachery of language, for always they desire the same things.
We must not subject him who creates to the desires of the multitude. It is, rather, his creation that must become the multitude's desire.
You see, one loves the sunset when one is so sad.
I shall look at you out of the corner of my eye, and you will say nothing. Words are the source of misunderstandings." -from the Fox-
What do we mean by setting a man free? You cannot free a man who dwells in a desert and is an unfeeling brute.
Perfection is attained, not when no more can be added, but when no more can be removed.