Inspirational Quotations

Inspirational Quotes by Antoine de Saint-Exupery (French Novelist, Aviator)

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

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

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: Vision, Dreams, Teamwork

Pure logic is the ruin of the spirit.
—Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Topics: Reason, Instincts, Logic

How could drops of water know themselves to be a river? Yet the river flows on.
—Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Topics: Discovery

Language is the source of misunderstandings.
—Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Topics: Language

You know you’ve achieved perfection in design, not when you have nothing more to add, but when you have nothing more to take away.
—Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Topics: Achieve, Rationality, Perfection, Perfect

Of what worth are convictions that bring not suffering?
—Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Topics: Belief

As for the future, your task is not to foresee it, but to enable it.
—Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Topics: Future

Whoever loves above all the approach of love will never know the joy of attaining it.
—Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Topics: Men & Women

Love does not cause suffering: what causes it is the sense of ownership, which is love’s opposite.
—Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Topics: Love

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

The field of consciousness is tiny. It accepts only one problem at a time.
—Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Topics: Concentration, Focus, Stress

Water has no taste, no color, no odor; it cannot be defined, art relished while ever mysterious. Not necessary to life, but rather life itself. It fills us with a gratification that exceeds the delight of the senses.
—Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Topics: Water

There is no hope or joy except in human relations.
—Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Topics: Hope, Joy, Friendship

There is not growth except in the fulfillment of obligations.
—Antoine de Saint-Exupery

The important thing is to strive towards a goal which is not immediately visible. That goal is not the concern of the mind, but of the spirit.
—Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Topics: Goals

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

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

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

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
Topics: Brothers, Humanity

The meaning of things lies not in the things themselves, but in our attitude towards them.
—Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Topics: Meaning

I know but one freedom and that is the freedom of the mind.
—Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Topics: Freedom

True happiness comes from the joy of deeds well done, the zest of creating things new.
—Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Topics: Happiness, Joy

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

War is not an adventure. It is a disease. It is like typhus.
—Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Topics: Realistic Expectations

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

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

What saves a man is to take a step. Then another step.
—Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Topics: One Step at a Time, Humankind, Action

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
Topics: Giving, Love

What makes the desert beautiful is that somewhere it hides a well.
—Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Topics: Water

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