Top 250 Antoine de Saint-Exupéry Quotes (2025 Update)
Page 4 of 6

151. “They never say to you, ‘What does his voice sound like? What games does he love best? Does he collect butterflies?’ Instead, they demand ‘How old is he? How many brothers has he? How much money does his father make?’ Only from these figures do they think they have learned anything about him.”

— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

152. “Loneliness is bred of a mind that has grown earth-bound.”

— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

153. “Sometimes we behave as though there was something more important than life. But what?”

— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

154. “There is nothing that can equal the treasure of so many shared memories.”

— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

155. “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-Exupéry

156. “A civilization is built on what is required of men, not on that which is provided for them.”

— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

157. “Man’s progress is but a gradual discovery that his questions have no meaning.”

— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

158. “When you tame someone they become unique to you in all the world.”

— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

159. “A man’s age represents a fine cargo of experiences and memories.”

— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

160. “Once men are caught up in an event, they cease to be afraid. Only the unknown frightens men.”

— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

161. “You give birth to that on which you fix your mind.”

— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

162. “Horror causes men to clench their fists, and in horror men join together.”

— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

163. “And that heart which was a wild garden was given to him who only loved trim lawns. And the imbecile carried the princess into slavery.”

— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

164. “Behind all seen things lies something vaster; everything is but a path, a portal or a window opening on something other than iteself.”

— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

165. “And at night I love to listen to the stars. It is like five hundred million little bells...”

— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

166. “The tree is more than first a seed, then a stem, then a living trunk, and then dead timber. The tree is a slow, enduring force straining to win the sky.”

— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

167. “Pure logic is the ruin of the spirit.”

— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

168. “For there is but one problem – the problem of human relations. We forget that there is no hope or joy except in human relations.”

— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

169. “But certainly, for us who understand life, figures are a matter of indifference.”

— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

170. “Night, when words fade and things come alive.”

— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

171. “It’s useful because it’s beautiful.”

— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

172. “You’re not a man, you’re a mushroom!”

— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

173. “War is not an adventure. It is a disease. It is like typhus.”

— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

174. “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-Exupéry

175. “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-Exupéry

176. “I saw the sunset forty-four times!”

— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

177. “Let a man in a garret but burn with enough intensity and he will set fire to the world.”

— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

178. “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-Exupéry

179. “It is the missed opportunity that counts, and in a love that vainly yearns from behind prison bars you have perchance the love supreme.”

— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

180. “It is as a soldier that you make love and as a lover that you make war.”

— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

181. “Experience will guide us to the rules. You cannot make rules precede practical experience.”

— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

182. “For, to conceited men, all other men are admirers.”

— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

183. “She knew this man’s smile, his gentle ways of love, but not his godlike fury in the storm. She might snare him in a fragile net of music, love and flowers, but, at each departure, he would break forth without, it seemed to her, the least regret.”

— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

184. “Even our misfortunes are a part of our belongings.”

— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

185. “The magic of the craft has opened for me a world in which I shall confront, within two hours, the black dragons and the crowned crests of a coma of blue lightnings, and when night has fallen I, delivered, shall read my course in the starts.”

— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

186. “Truth, for any man, is that which makes him a man.”

— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

187. “I was wrong to grow older. Pity. I was so happy as a child.”

— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

188. “Vain is the hope of finding pleasure in that which one has hitherto disdained; as when the warrior hopes to find pleasure in the joys of the sedentaries.”

— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

189. “Man is, above all, he who creates.”

— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

190. “But the flower was not satisfied to complete the preparations for her beauty in the shelter of her green chamber. She chose her colours with the greatest care. She dressed herself slowly. She adjusted her petals one by one. She did not wish to go out into the world all rumpled, like the field poppies. It was only in the full radiance of her beauty that she wished to appear.”

— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

191. “One must observe the proper rites.”

— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

192. “When one wishes to play the wit, he sometimes wander a little from the truth.”

— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

193. “He fell as gently as a tree falls. There was not even any sound...”

— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

194. “When a mystery is too overpowering, one dare not disobey.”

— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

195. “I am very fond of sunsets. Come, let us go look at a sunset.”

— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

196. “If Someone wants a sheep, then that means that he exists.”

— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

197. “Only the children know what they are looking for. They waste their time over a rag doll and it becomes very important to them; and if anybody takes it away from them, they cry...”

— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

198. “I believe that for his escape he took advantage of the migration of a flock of wild birds.”

— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

199. “The seed haunted by the sun never fails to find its way between the stones in the ground. And the pure logician, if no sun draws him forth, remains entangled in his logic.”

— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

200. “Navigating by the compass in a sea of clouds over Spain is all very well, it is very dashing, but – you want to remember that below the sea of clouds lies eternity.”

— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry