Top 250 Antoine de Saint-Exupéry Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “Straight ahead you can’t go very far.”

— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

52. “Life has meaning only if one barters it day by day for something other than itself.”

— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

53. “In giving you are throwing a bridge across the chasm of your solitude.”

— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

54. “I have always loved the desert. One sits down on a desert sand dune, sees nothing, hears nothing. Yet through the silence something throbs, and gleams...”

— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

55. “What does tamed mean? It’s something that’s been too often neglected. It means to create ties.”

— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

56. “I fly because it releases my mind from the tyranny of petty things.”

— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

57. “But if you tame me, my life will be filled with sunshine. I’ll know the sound of footsteps that will be different from all the rest. Others send me back underground. Yours will call me out of my burrow like music.”

— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

58. “You cannot plant an acorn in the morning, and expect that afternoon to sit in the shade of an oak.”

— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

59. “True happiness comes from the joy of deeds well done, the zest of creating things new.”

— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

60. “We are prudent people. We are afraid to let go of our petty reality in order to grasp at a great shadow.”

— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

61. “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-Exupéry

62. “But if you come at just any time, I shall never know at what hour my heart is to be ready to greet you.”

— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

63. “I have always learned to distinguish the important from the urgent.”

— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

64. “To love is not to look at one another: it is to look, together, in the same direction.”

— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

65. “You see, one loves the sunset when one is so sad.”

— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

66. “We live not by things, but by the meaning of things. It is needful to transmit the passwords from generation to generation.”

— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

67. “To become a man is to be responsible; to be ashamed of miseries that you did not cause.”

— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

68. “The house, the stars, the desert – what gives them their beauty is something that is invisible!”

— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

69. “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-Exupéry

70. “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-Exupéry

71. “To be a man is, precisely, 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-Exupéry

72. “Nothing can match the treasure of common memories, of trials endured together, of quarrels and reconciliations and generous emotions. It is idle, having planted an acorn in the morning, to expect that afternoon to sit in the shade of the oak.”

— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

73. “Demagoguery enters at the moment when, for want of a common denominator, the principle of equality degenerates into the principle of identity.”

— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

74. “No individual is isolated. He who is sad, saddens others.”

— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

75. “I still fall for your everyday.”

— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

76. “Man is but a network of relationships and these alone matter to him.”

— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

77. “Sorrow is one of the vibrations that prove the fact of living.”

— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

78. “No one is ever satisfied where he is.”

— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

79. “One man may hit the mark, another blunder; but heed not these distinctions. Only from the alliance of the one, working with and through the other, are great things born.”

— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

80. “He who would travel happy must travel lite.”

— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

81. “It is always in the midst, in the epicenter, of your troubles that you find serenity.”

— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

82. “If I were to command a general to turn into a seagull, and if the general did not obey, that would not be the general’s fault. It would be mine.”

— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

83. “No truth is proved, no truth achieved, by argument, and the ready-made truths men offer you are mere conveniences or drugs to make you sleep.”

— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

84. “He who bears in his heart a cathedral to be built is already victorious. He who seeks to become sexton of a finished cathedral is already defeated.”

— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

85. “Prison is not a mere physical horror. It is using a pickaxe to no purpose that makes a prison.”

— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

86. “Life always bursts the boundaries of formulas.”

— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

87. “Cries of despair, misery, sobbing grief are a kind of wealth.”

— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

88. “And the little prince broke into a lovely peal of laughter, which irritated me very much. I like my misfortunes to be taken seriously.”

— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

89. “One must require from each one the duty which each one can perform. Accepted authority rests first of all on reason.”

— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

90. “Confuse not love with the raptures of possession, which bring the cruellest of sufferings. For, notwithstanding the general opinion, love does not cause suffering: what causes it is the sense of ownership, which is love’s opposite.”

— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

91. “Men have no more time to understand anything. They buy things all ready made at the shops. But there is no shop anywhere where one can buy friendship, and so men have no friends any more. If you want a friend, tame me...”

— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

92. “The essential things in life are seen, not with the eyes but with the heart.”

— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

93. “You risk tears if you let yourself be tamed.”

— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

94. “Sometimes, there is no harm in putting off a piece of work until another day.”

— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

95. “But the conceited man did not hear him. Conceited people never hear anything but praise.”

— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

96. “True love is inexhaustible; the more you give, the more you have.”

— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

97. “If you are to be, you must begin by assuming responsibility. You alone are responsible for every moment of your life, for every one of your acts.”

— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

98. “The field of consciousness is tiny. It accepts only one problem at a time. Get into a fist fight, put your mind on the strategy of the fight, and you will not feel the other fellow’s punches.”

— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

99. “Even though human life may be the most precious thing on earth, we always behave as if there were something of higher value than human life.”

— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

100. “Treason implies responsibility for something, control over something, influence upon something, knowledge of something. Treason in our time is a proof of genius. Why, I want to know, are not traitors decorated?”

— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry