1900-1944, French Aviator, Writer
A civilization is a heritage of beliefs, customs, and knowledge slowly accumulated in the course of centuries, elements difficult at times to justify by logic, but justifying themselves as paths when they lead somewhere, since they open up for man his inner distance.
Antoine De Saint-Exupery – [Civilization]
A civilization is built on what is required of men, not on that which is provided for them.
Antoine De Saint-Exupery – [Civilization]
A pile of rocks ceases to be a rock when somebody contemplates it with the idea of a cathedral in mind.
Antoine De Saint-Exupery – [Ideas]
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.
Antoine De Saint-Exupery – [War]
Charity never humiliated him who profited from it, nor ever bound him by the chains of gratitude, since it was not to him but to God that the gift was made.
Antoine De Saint-Exupery – [Charity]
Commonly, people believe that defeat is characterized by a general bustle and a feverish rush. Bustle and rush are the signs of victory, not of defeat. Victory is a thing of action. It is a house in the act of being built. Every participant in victory sweats and puffs, carrying the stones for the building of the house. But defeat is a thing of weariness, of incoherence, of boredom. And above all of futility.
Antoine De Saint-Exupery – [Defeat]
Each man must look to himself to teach him the meaning of life. It is not something discovered: it is something molded.
Antoine De Saint-Exupery – [Life and Living]
For true love is inexhaustible; the more you give, the more you have. And if you go to draw at the true fountainhead, the more water you draw, the more abundant is its flow.
Antoine De Saint-Exupery – [Giving]
How could drops of water know themselves to be a river? Yet the river flows on.
Antoine De Saint-Exupery – [Meaning of Life]
How could there be any question of acquiring or possessing, when the one thing needful for a man is to become — to be at last, and to die in the fullness of his being.
Antoine De Saint-Exupery – [Purpose]
I know but one freedom and that is the freedom of the mind.
Antoine De Saint-Exupery – [Freedom]
It is in the compelling zest of high adventure and of victory, and in creative action, that man finds his supreme joys.
Antoine De Saint-Exupery – [Happiness]
It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.
Antoine De Saint-Exupery – [Faith]
Love does not consist in gazing at each other, but in looking outward together in the same direction.
Antoine De Saint-Exupery – [Love]
Love is not just looking at each other, it's looking in the same direction.
Antoine De Saint-Exupery – [Love]
More wisdom is latent in things as they are than in all the words men use.
Antoine De Saint-Exupery – [Wisdom]
Night, the beloved. Night, when words fade and things come alive. When the destructive analysis of day is done, and all that is truly important becomes whole and sound again. When man reassembles his fragmentary self and grows with the calm of a tree.
Antoine De Saint-Exupery – [Night]
Of what worth are convictions that bring not suffering?
Antoine De Saint-Exupery – [Belief]
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.
Antoine De Saint-Exupery – [Funerals]
One can be a brother only in something. Where there is no tie that binds men, men are not united but merely lined up.
Antoine De Saint-Exupery – [Human Fellowship]