Antoine Marie Roger de Saint-Exupéry (1900–44) was a French novelist, essayist, and aviator. He is best known for the fable Le Petit Prince (The Little Prince.)
Born in Lyon to an aristocratic family, Saint-Exupéry took great interest in the rapidly developing science of flight. He was conscripted at age 21 into the French air force, qualifying as military pilot a year later. He became a commercial pilot in 1926, flying first from France to Morocco and West Africa. His experiences inspired the novel that launched his literary career, Courrier Sud (1929; Southern Mail.) It portrays a pilot’s solitary struggle against the elements and his sense of dedication to his vocation.
During the following years, Saint-Exupéry pursued his flying career, despite several crashes. His Terre des hommes (1939; Wind, Sand and Stars) was a series of poetic essays on the pilot’s meditations on the spiritual aspects of the adventure of flight. It brought Saint-Exupéry to the height of literary fame.
Saint-Exupéry’s other works include the fable Le Petit Prince (1943; The Little Prince,) Citadelle (1948; The Wisdom of the Sands,) and volumes of correspondence and notebook jottings. Le Petit Prince features a little prince who visits earth from his tiny planet. It is considered a literary classic that examines loneliness, friendship, and philosophy. Saint-Exupéry even did the watercolors for the book. It’s been translated into over 250 languages and dialects, including Braille, and sells 2 million copies annually.
During World War II, even when he was too old to fly, Saint-Exupéry insisted on serving in the air force. He flew his last mission in 1944. It was assumed that his plane had crashed in the Alps, but more than 60 years later, the wreckage was recovered from the Mediterranean seabed near Provence.
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Antoine de Saint-Exupery
“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”.
—Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Topics: Responsibility
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
Topics: Victory, To Be Born Everyday, Adventure, Creativity, Happiness, Enthusiasm
War is not an adventure. It is a disease. It is like typhus.
—Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Topics: Realistic Expectations
A single event can awaken within us a stranger totally unknown to us. To live is to be slowly born.
—Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Topics: Self-Discovery, Self-Knowledge, Awareness, Living, Change, Events
More wisdom is latent in things as they are than in all the words men use.
—Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Topics: Wisdom
Pure logic is the ruin of the spirit.
—Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Topics: Instincts, Reason, Logic
He who is different from me does not impoverish me – he enriches me. Our unity is constituted in something higher than ourselves – in Man… For no man seeks to hear his own echo, or to find his reflection in the glass.
—Antoine de Saint-Exupery
He who would travel happily must travel light.
—Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Topics: Love, Travel
Once men are caught up in an event they cease to be afraid. Only the unknown frightens men.
—Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Topics: Events
But the eyes are blind. One must look with the heart…
—Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Topics: Heart
He who has gone, so we but cherish his memory, abides with us, more potent, nay, more present than the living man.
—Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Topics: Death, Sympathy
Life has a meaning only if one barters it day by day for something other than itself.
—Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Topics: Life, Aspirations, Meaning, Goals, Purpose
It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.
—Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Topics: Vision, Faith, Romance, Heart
Transport of the mails, transport of the human voice, transport of flickering pictures—in this century as in others our highest accomplishments still have the single aim of bringing men together.
—Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Topics: Technology, Communication
It is the time you have wasted for your rose that makes your rose so important.
—Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Topics: Time Management, Value of a Day
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.
—Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Topics: Commitment
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?
—Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Topics: Liberty
Reminding one another of the dream that each of us aspires to may be enough for us to set each other free.
—Antoine de Saint-Exupery
How could drops of water know themselves to be a river? Yet the river flows on.
—Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Topics: Discovery
If someone loves a flower of which just one example exists among all the millions and millions of stars, that’s enough to make him happy when he looks at the stars.
—Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Topics: Happiness
What makes the desert beautiful is that somewhere it hides a well
—Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Topics: Water
It is such a secret place, the land of tears.
—Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Topics: Crying
A rock pile ceases to be a rock pile the moment a single man contemplates it, bearing within him the image of a cathedral.
—Antoine de Saint-Exupery
A civilization is built on what is required of men, not on that which is provided for them.
—Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Topics: Civilization
As for the future, your task is not to foresee it, but to enable it.
—Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Topics: Future
Life has taught us that love does not consist in gazing at each other but in looking outward together in the same direction.
—Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Topics: Romance, War, Togetherness, Life, Love
There is a cheap literature that speaks to us of the need of escape. It is true that when we travel we are in search of distance. But distance is not to be found. It melts away. And escape has never led anywhere. The moment a man finds that he must play the races, go the Arctic, or make war in order to feel himself alive, that man has begin to spin the strands that bind him to other men and to the world. But what wretched strands! A civilization that is really strong fills man to the brim, though he never stir. What are we worth when motionless, is the question.
—Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Only the unknown frightens men. But once a man has faced the unknown, that terror becomes the known.
—Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Topics: Mystery
Language is the source of misunderstandings.
—Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Topics: Language
The friend within the man is that part of him which belongs to you and opens to you a door which never, perhaps, is opened to another. Such a friend is true, and all he says is true; and he loves you even if he hates you in other mansions of his heart.
—Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Topics: Friendship
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