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
The one thing that matters is the effort. It continues, whereas the end to be attained is but an illusion of the climber, as he fares on and on from crest to crest; and once the goal is reached it has no meaning.
—Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Topics: Effort
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
Topics: Purpose
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
Topics: Charity
One’s suffering disappears when one lets oneself go, when one yields – even to sadness.
—Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Topics: Emotions
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 always in the midst, in the epicenter, of your troubles that you find serenity.
—Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Topics: Adversity
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
Pure logic is the ruin of the spirit.
—Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Topics: Instincts, Reason, Logic
Sorrow is one of the vibrations that prove the fact of living.
—Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Topics: Sadness
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.
—Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Topics: Self-reliance, Confidence, Responsibility, Leadership, Failures, Mistakes, Failure
As for the future, your task is not to foresee it, but to enable it.
—Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Topics: Future
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
Topics: War
Life has a meaning only if one barters it day by day for something other than itself.
—Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Topics: Aspirations, Goals, Meaning, Purpose, Life
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
Perfection is finally attained not when there is no longer anything to add but when there is no longer anything to take away, when a body has been stripped down to its nakedness.
—Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Topics: Perfection
A civilization is built on what is required of men, not on that which is provided for them.
—Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Topics: Civilization
I fly because it releases my mind from the tyranny of petty things.
—Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Topics: Flying
The meaning of things lies not in the things themselves, but in our attitude towards them.
—Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Topics: Meaning
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
Topics: Mistakes, Defeat, Failures
But the eyes are blind. One must look with the heart…
—Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Topics: Heart
Love does not consist of gazing at each other, but in looking together in the same direction.
—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
All of us have had the experience of a sudden joy that came when nothing in the world had forewarned us of its coming – a joy so thrilling that if it was born of misery we remembered even the misery with tenderness.
—Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Topics: Happiness
The field of consciousness is tiny. It accepts only one problem at a time.
—Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Topics: Stress, Concentration, Focus
A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.
—Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Topics: Perfectionism
When the body sinks into death, the essence of man is revealed. Man is a knot, a web, a mesh into which relationships are tied. Only those relationships matter. The body is an old crock that nobody will miss. I have never known a man to think of himself when dying. Never.
—Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Topics: Friendship, Death, Relationships, Dying
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
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.
—Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Topics: Responsibility
There is no hope or joy except in human relations.
—Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Topics: Hope, Friendship, Joy
Only the unknown frightens men. But once a man has faced the unknown, that terror becomes the known.
—Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Topics: Mystery
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
Perhaps love is the process of my leading you gently back to yourself. Not to whom I want you to be, but to who you are.
—Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Topics: Love
You are responsible, forever, for what you have tamed. You are responsible for your rose.
—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: Happiness, Creativity, Enthusiasm, Adventure, Victory, To Be Born Everyday
Living is being born slowly. It would be a little too easy if we could borrow ready-made souls.
—Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Topics: Self-Discovery
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
Topics: Civilization
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
Topics: Life and Living
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
If you want to build a ship, don’t herd 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.
—Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Topics: Teamwork, Dreams, Vision
I have no right, by anything I do or say, to demean a human being in his own eyes. What matters is not what I think of him; it is what he thinks of himself. To undermine a man’s self-respect is a sin.
—Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Topics: Self-respect, Insults
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