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
Night, the beloved. 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. When man reassembles his fragmentary self and grows with the calm of a tree.
—Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Topics: Night
One’s suffering disappears when one lets oneself go, when one yields – even to sadness.
—Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Topics: Emotions
What makes the desert beautiful is that somewhere it hides a well
—Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Topics: Water
Life has a meaning only if one barters it day by day for something other than itself.
—Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Topics: Purpose, Goals, Meaning, Aspirations, Life
What saves a man is to take a step. Then another step.
—Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Topics: Action, Humankind, One Step at a Time
The field of consciousness is tiny. It accepts only one problem at a time.
—Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Topics: Stress, Focus, Concentration
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
Love does not consist of gazing at each other, but in looking together in the same direction.
—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
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 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
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
How could drops of water know themselves to be a river? Yet the river flows on.
—Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Topics: Discovery
More wisdom is latent in things as they are than in all the words men use.
—Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Topics: Wisdom
Let your dream devour your life, not your life devour your dream.
—Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Topics: Dreams
We say nothing essential about the cathedral when we speak of its stones. We say nothing essential about Man when we seek to define him by the qualities of men.
—Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Topics: Humankind, Humanity
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, Heart, Faith, Romance
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: Defeat, Mistakes, Failures
You are responsible, forever, for what you have tamed. You are responsible for your rose.
—Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Topics: Responsibility
I know but one freedom and that is the freedom of the mind.
—Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Topics: Freedom
It is such a secret place, the land of tears.
—Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Topics: Crying
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: Enthusiasm, Victory, Happiness, Creativity, To Be Born Everyday, Adventure
War is not an adventure. It is a disease. It is like typhus.
—Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Topics: Realistic Expectations
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, Achieve, Perfection, Perfect
To be a man is, precisely, to be responsible.
—Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Topics: Confidence, Self-reliance
I fly because it releases my mind from the tyranny of petty things.
—Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Topics: Flying
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 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
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
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: Humanity, Brothers
Only he can understand what a farm is, what a country is, who shall have sacrificed part of himself to his farm or country, fought to save it, struggled to make it beautiful. Only then will the love of farm or country fill his heart.
—Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Topics: Sacrifice
The one thing that matters is the effort.
—Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Topics: Effort
Sorrow is one of the vibrations that prove the fact of living.
—Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Topics: Sadness
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
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
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
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: Dreams, Vision, Teamwork
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
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
Love does not cause suffering: what causes it is the sense of ownership, which is love’s opposite
—Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Topics: Love
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