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
If I were to command a general to turn into a seagull, and if the general did not obey, that would not be the general's fault. It would be mine.
Navigating by the compass in a sea of clouds over Spain is all very well, it is very dashing, but - you want to remember that below the sea of clouds lies eternity.
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.
If you want to build a ship, teach the men to yearn for the vast and endless sea.
When one is building a ship, one does not begin with gathering timber and cutting planks, but rather by arousing in people the yearning for the great wide sea.
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
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.
You will have five hundred million little bells, and I shall have five hundred million springs of fresh water...