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Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

1900–1944 · lived 44 years

n. 1900-06-29, 2nd arrondissement of Lyon · m. 1944-07-31, île de Riou

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Poems

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Quotes

It is much more difficult to judge oneself than to judge others. If you succeed in judging yourself rightly, then you are indeed a man of true wisdom.

The New Yale Book of Quotations

Although human life is priceless, we always act as if something had an even greater price than life. . . . But what is that something?

The New Yale Book of Quotations

Let a man in a garret but burn with enough intensity and he will set fire to the world.

Cries of despair, misery, sobbing grief are a kind of wealth.

Water, thou hast no taste, no color, no odor; canst not be defined, art relished while ever mysterious. Not necessary to life, but rather life itself, thou fillest us with a gratification that exceeds the delight of the senses.

It is the savor of bread broken with comrades that makes us accept the values of war.

Once men are caught up in an event they cease to be afraid. Only the unknown frightens men.

Horror causes men to clench their fists, and in horror men join together.

How should men know what is coming to pass within them, when there are no words to grasp it? How could the drops of water know themselves to be a river? Yet the river flows on.

When faith burns itself out, ’tis God who dies and thenceforth proves unavailing.

Truths may clash without contradicting each other.

Truth is not that which is demonstrable but that which is ineluctable.

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.

The machine does not isolate man from the great problems of nature but plunges him more deeply into them.

“Good taste” is a virtue of the keepers of museums. If you scorn bad taste, you will have neither painting nor dancing, neither palaces nor gardens.

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?

Only he can understand what a farm is, what a country is, who shall have sacrificed part of himself to his farm or country.

To be a man is, precisely, to be responsible.

There is no hope of joy except in human relations.

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.

Pure logic is the ruin of the spirit.

More wisdom is latent in things-as-they-are than in all the words men use.

We are prudent people. We are afraid to let go of our petty reality in order to grasp at a great shadow.

Prison is not a mere physical horror. It is using a pickaxe to no purpose that makes a prison.

Vain is the hope of finding pleasure in that which one has hitherto disdained; as when the warrior hopes to find pleasure in the joys of the sedentaries.

What value has compassion that does not take its object in its arms?

In anything at all, perfection is finally attained not when there is no longer anything to add, but when there is no longer anything to take away.

Mad is the man who is forever gritting his teeth against that grani.te block, complete and changeless, of the past.

Peace is present when man can see the face that is composed of things that have meaning and are in their place. Peace is present when things form part of a whole greater than their sum, as the diverse minerals in the ground collect to become the tree.

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. v

A man has many parts, he is virtually everything, and you are free to select in him that part which pleases you.

It is the missed opportunity that counts, and in a love that vainly yearns from behind prison bars you have perchance the love supreme.

Love does not cause suffering: what causes it is the sense of ownership, which is love’s opposite.

Loneliness is bred of a mind that has grown earth- bound.

A chief is a man who assumes responsibility. He says, “I was beaten.” He does not say, “My men were beaten.” Thus speaks a real man.

The notion of looking on at life has always been hateful to me. What am I if I am not a participant? In order to be, I must participate.

The flower you single out is a rejection of all other flowers; nevertheless, only on these terms is it beautiful.

The dignity of the individual demands that he be not reduced to vassalage by the largesse of others.

No single event can awaken within us a stranger totally unknown to us. To live is to be slowly born.

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