Top 250 Antoine de Saint-Exupéry Quotes (2025 Update)
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201. “The proof that the little prince existed is that he was charming, that he laughed, and that he was looking for a sheep. If anybody wants a sheep, that is a proof that he exists.”

— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

202. “To grasp the meaning of the world of today we use a language created to express the world of yesterday. The life of the past seems to us nearer our true natures, but only for the reason that it is nearer our language.”

— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

203. “I don’t believe you! Flowers are weak creatures. They are naive. They reassure themselves as best they can. They believe that their thorns are terrible weapons...”

— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

204. “Once we are bound together to our brothers by a common good that is outside us, then we can breathe. Experience teaches us that love is not to gaze at one another but to gaze in the same direction. There is no comradeship except through unity on the same rope, climbing towards the same peak.”

— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

205. “I like my misfortunes to be taken seriously.”

— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

206. “When faith burns itself out, ’tis God who dies and thenceforth proves unavailing.”

— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

207. “Peace is present when things form part of a whole greater than their sum, as the diverse minerals in the ground collect to become the tree.”

— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

208. “Surely a man needs a closed place wherein he may strike root and, like the seed, become. But also he needs the great Milky Way above him and the vast sea spaces, though neither stars nor ocean serve his daily needs.”

— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

209. “I do not eat bread. Wheat is of no use to me. The wheat fields have nothing to say to me. And that is sad. But you have hair that is the color of gold. Think how wonderful that will be when you have tamed me! The grain, which is also golden, will bring me back the thought of you. And I shall love to listen to the wind in the wheat...”

— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

210. “The flower you single out is a rejection of all other flowers; nevertheless, only on these terms is it beautiful.”

— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

211. “Truth is not that which is demonstrable but that which is ineluctable.”

— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

212. “No single event can awaken within us a stranger totally unknown to us. To live is to be slowly born. It would be a bit too easy if we could go about borrowing ready-made souls.”

— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

213. “Man is a knot into which relationships are tied.”

— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

214. “It is much more difficult to judge oneself than to judge others.”

— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

215. “If I had fifty-three minutes to spend as I liked, I should walk at my leisure toward a spring of fresh water.”

— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

216. “Flying is a man’s job and its worries are a man’s worries.”

— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

217. “You will have five hundred million little bells, and I shall have five hundred million springs of fresh water...”

— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

218. “It is the duty of the ship’s captain to make port, cost what it may.”

— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

219. “The important thing is to strive toward a goal which is not immediately visible. That goal is not the concern of the mind, but of the spirit.”

— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

220. “It is the savor of bread broken with comrades that makes us accept the values of war.”

— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

221. “Each man carries within him the soul of a poet who died young.”

— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

222. “What torments me is not the humps nor hollows nor the ugliness. It is the sight, a little bit in all these men, of Mozart murdered.”

— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

223. “What value has compassion that does not take its object in its arms?”

— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

224. “No destiny attacks us from outside. But, within him, man bears his fate and there comes a moment when he knows himself vulnerable; and then, as in a vertigo, blunder upon blunder lures him.”

— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

225. “More wisdom is latent in things as they are than in all the words men use.”

— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

226. “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.”

— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

227. “He had taken seriously words which were without importance, and it made him very unhappy.”

— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

228. “It is not a question of living dangerously. That formula is too arrogant, too presumptuous. I don’t care much for bull-fighters. It’s not the danger I love. I know what I love. It is life itself.”

— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

229. “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-Exupéry

230. “Of what worth are convictions that bring not suffering?”

— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

231. “It was the contemplation of God that created men who were equal, for it was in God that they were equal.”

— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

232. “A chief is a man who assumes responsibility. He says ‘I was beaten,’ he does not say ‘My men were beaten.’”

— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

233. “What he had yearned to embrace was not the flesh but a down spirit, a spark, the impalpable angel that inhabits the flesh.”

— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

234. “Perhaps creativity is fumbling that dance step, or driving the chisel the wrong way into the stone.”

— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

235. “That’s the way they are. You must not hold it against them. Children should be very understanding of grown-ups.”

— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

236. “Peace dies when the framework is ripped apart. When there is no longer a place that is yours in the world. When you know no longer where your friend is to be found.”

— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

237. “When I find a woman attractive, I have nothing at all to say. I simply watch her smile. Intellectuals take apart her face in order to explain it bit by bit, but they no longer see the smile.”

— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

238. “What was my body to me? A kind of flunkey in my service. Let but my anger wax hot, my love grow exalted, my hatred collect in me, and that boasted solidarity between me and my body was gone.”

— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

239. “Truths may clash without contradicting each other.”

— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

240. “The wind in the grain is the caress to the spouse; it is the hand of peace stroking her hair.”

— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

241. “In order to cure a feeling of malaise, you have to throw light on it.”

— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

242. “If France is to be judged, judge her not by the effects of her defeat but by her readiness to sacrifice herself.”

— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

243. “How could there be any question of acquiring or possessing, when the one thing needful for a man is to become – to be at last, and to die in the fullness of his being.”

— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

244. “If it is true that wars are won by believers, it is also true that peace treaties are sometimes signed by businessmen.”

— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

245. “What do we mean by setting a man free? You cannot free a man who dwells in a desert and is an unfeeling brute.”

— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

246. “I shall never again admire a merely brave man.”

— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

247. “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-Exupéry

248. “Defeat is a thing of weariness, of incoherence, of boredom, and above all futility.”

— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

249. “Nobody grasped you by the shoulder while there was still time. Now the clay of which you were shaped has dried and hardened, and naught in you will ever awaken the sleeping musician, the poet, the asronomer that possibly inhabited you in the beginning.”

— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

250. “When you’ve finished your own toilet in the morning, then it is time to attend to the toilet of your planet, just so, with the greatest care.”

— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry