Quotes from Antoine de Saint-Exupery

Man is, above all, he who creates.

True, it is evil that a single man should crush the herd, but see not there the worse form of slavery, which is when the herd crushes out the man.

For, to conceited men, all other men are admirers.

You're not a man, you're a mushroom!

He who never says "no" is no true man.

We understand … that what constitutes the dignity of a craft is that it creates a fellowship, that it binds men together and fashions for them a common language.

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.

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.

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

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

Freedom and constraint are two aspects of the same necessity, the necessity of being the man you are and not another. You are free to be that man, but not another.

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.

"It's a question of discipline," the little prince told me later on. "When you've finished washing and dressing each morning, you must tend your planet."

The time for action is now. It's never too late to do something.

The one thing that matters is the effort.

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

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.

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

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.

When one wishes to play the wit, he sometimes wanders a little from the truth.

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

One cannot build life from refrigerators, politics, credit statements and crossword puzzles. That is impossible. Nor can one exist for any length of time without poetry, without color, without love.

Attitude is a paintbrush. It colors everything!

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.