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
What saves a man is to take a step. Then another step.
You are responsible, forever, for what you have tamed. You are responsible for your rose.
A single event can awaken within us a stranger totally unknown to us. To live is to be slowly born.
A pile of rocks ceases to be a rock when somebody contemplates it with the idea of a cathedral in mind.
Life has taught us that love does not consist in gazing at each other but in looking outward together in the same direction.
Life has taught us that love does not consist in gazing at each other, but in looking together in the same direction.
Loving is not just looking at each other, it's looking in the same direction.
Love is not just looking at each other, it's looking in the same direction.
Love does not consist in gazing at each other but in looking together in the same direction.
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.
If you want to build a ship, don't drum up people together to collect wood and don't assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea
To be a man is 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.
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?
Grown-ups never understand anything by themselves, and it is tiresome for children to be always and forever explaining things to them.