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
A chief is a man who assumes responsibility. He says 'I was beaten,' he does not say 'My men were beaten.'
"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."
To be a man is, precisely, 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.
If you are to be, you must begin by assuming responsibility. You alone are responsible for every moment of your life, for every one of your acts.
You become responsible, forever, for what you have tamed.
Treason implies responsibility for something, control over something, influence upon something, knowledge of something. Treason in our time is a proof of genius. Why, I want to know, are not traitors decorated?
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.
You are beautiful, but you are empty. One could not die for you. To be sure, an ordinary passerby would think that my rose looked just like you--the rose that belongs to me. But in herself alone she is more important than all the hundreds of you other roses: because it is she that I have watered.
It is the savor of bread broken with comrades that makes us accept the values of war.
Once we are bound together to our brothers by a common good that is outside us, then we can breathe. Experience teaches us that love is not to gaze at one another but to gaze in the same direction. There is no comradeship except through unity on the same rope, climbing towards the same peak.
No truth is proved, no truth achieved, by argument, and the ready-made truths men offer you are mere conveniences or drugs to make you sleep.
Nothing comes of severity if there be no leanings towards a change of heart. And if there be natural leanings towards a change of heart, what need for severity?
He who never says "no" is no true man.
The seed haunted by the sun never fails to find its way between the stones in the ground. And the pure logician, if no sun draws him forth, remains entangled in his logic.