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

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

Grown-ups never understand anything for themselves, and it is tiresome for children to be always and forever explaining things to them.
Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Topics: Children, Inner-child

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: Dying, Death, Relationships, Friendship

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

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

It is the time you have wasted for your rose that makes your rose so important.
Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Topics: Value of a Day, Time Management

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

A man’s age is something impressive, it sums up his life: maturity reached slowly and against many obstacles, illnesses cured, griefs and despairs overcome, and unconscious risks taken; maturity formed through so many desires, hopes, regrets, forgotten things, loves. A man’s age represents a fine cargo of experiences and memories.
Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Topics: Age

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

Life always bursts the boundaries of formulas.
Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Topics: Life

It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.
Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Topics: Faith, Vision, Heart, Romance

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

More wisdom is latent in things as they are than in all the words men use.
Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Topics: Wisdom

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

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

Only the unknown frightens men. But once a man has faced the unknown, that terror becomes the known.
Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Topics: Mystery

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

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: Rationality, Perfect, Perfection, Achieve

When you give yourself, you receive more than you give.
Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Topics: Giving, Charity

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

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

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
Topics: 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
Topics: 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
Topics: Charity

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

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

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: Life, Love, War, Togetherness, Romance

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

An administration, like a machine, does not create. It carries on.
Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Topics: Government

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

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