Top 250 Antoine de Saint-Exupéry Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “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

102. “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

103. “To be a man is, precisely, to be responsible.”

— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

104. “Attitude is a paintbrush. It colors everything!”

— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

105. “We do not pray for immortality, but only not to see our acts and all things stripped suddenly of all their meaning; for then it is the utter emptiness of everything reveals itself.”

— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

106. “Where I live, everything is very small.”

— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

107. “If a composer suffers from loss of sleep and his sleeplessness induces him to turn out masterpieces, what a profitable loss it is!”

— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

108. “What sets us against one another is not our aims-they all come to the same thing-but our methods, which are the fruit of our varied reasoning.”

— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

109. “The meaning of things lies not in the things themselves, but in our attitude towards them in particular caused by what we compare it to: something worse and we feel grateful for what we have; something better and we feel somehow let down.”

— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

110. “Only the children know what they are looking for.”

— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

111. “Water, thou hast no taste, no color, no odor; canst not be defined, art relished while ever mysterious. Not necessary to life, but rather life itself, thou fillest us with a gratification that exceeds the delight of the senses.”

— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

112. “He who has gone, so we but cherish his memory, abides with us, more potent, nay, more present than the living man.”

— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

113. “Look at the sky. Ask yourselves: Has the sheep eaten the flower, yes or no? And you will see how everything changes...”

— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

114. “I have lived a great deal among grown-ups. I have seen them intimately, close at hand. And that hasn’t much improved my opinion of them.”

— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

115. “The dignity of the individual demands that he be not reduced to vassalage by the largesse of others.”

— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

116. “Love, like a carefully loaded ship, crosses the gulf between the generations.”

— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

117. “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-Exupéry

118. “Love is not about staring at each other, but staring off in the same direction.”

— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

119. “One is a member of a country, a profession, a civilization, a religion. One is not just a man.”

— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

120. “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-Exupéry

121. “You’ll be bothered from time to time by storms, fog, snow. When you are, think of those who went through it before you, and say to yourself, ‘What they could do, I can do.’”

— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

122. “The only things you learn are the things you tame.”

— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

123. “To be a man is to feel that one’s own stone contributes to building the edifice of the world.”

— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

124. “On ne sait jamais! One never knows!”

— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

125. “It is only with the heart that one can see rightly.”

— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

126. “No single event can awaken within us a stranger whose existence we had never suspected. To live is to be slowly born.”

— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

127. “An administration, like a machine, does not create. It carries on.”

— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

128. “One’s suffering disappears when one lets oneself go, when one yields – even to sadness.”

— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

129. “The field of consciousness is tiny. It accepts only one problem at a time.”

— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

130. “A man has many parts, he is virtually everything, and you are free to select in him that part which pleases you.”

— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

131. “One only really sees with the heart.”

— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

132. “Whoever loves above all the approach of love will never know the joy of attaining it.”

— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

133. “How could drops of water know themselves to be a river? Yet the river flows on.”

— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

134. “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-Exupéry

135. “A sky as pure as water bathed the stars and brought them out.”

— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

136. “The stars are beautiful, because of a flower that cannot be seen... The desert is beautiful,” the little prince added. And that was true. 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... “What makes the desert beautiful,” said the little prince, “is that somewhere it hides a well... ” I was astonished by a sudden understanding of that mysterious radiation of the sands.”

— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

137. “The tender friendships one gives up, on parting, leave their bite on the heart, but also a curious feeling of a treasure somewhere buried.”

— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

138. “The Beauty of the Mountain is hidden for all those who try to discover it from the top, supposing that, one way or an other, one can reach this place directly. The Beauty of the Mountain reveals only to those who climbed it...”

— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

139. “If you tame me, it would be as if the sun came to shine on my life.”

— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

140. “Grown ups are certainly very strange.”

— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

141. “The tree is a slow, enduring force straining to win the sky.”

— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

142. “We don’t ask to be eternal beings. We only ask that things do not lose all their meaning.”

— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

143. “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-Exupéry

144. “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-Exupéry

145. “The machine does not isolate man from the great problems of nature but plunges him more deeply into them.”

— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

146. “Love does not cause suffering: what causes it is the sense of ownership, which is love’s opposite.”

— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

147. “The meaning of things lies not in the things themselves, but in our attitude towards them.”

— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

148. “The airplane has unveiled for us the true face of the earth.”

— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

149. “Freedom and constraint are two aspects of the same necessity, which is to be what one is and no other.”

— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

150. “Trying to be witty leads to lying, more or less.”

— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry