Quotes from Antoine de Saint-Exupery

When you want to build a ship, then do not drum the men together in order to procure wood, to give instructions or to distribute the work, but teach them longing for the wide endless sea.

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

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

The house, the stars, the desert -- what gives them their beauty is something that is invisible!

The grandeur of a profession is...above all, uniting men: there is only one true luxury, that of human relationships.

I shall never again admire a merely brave man.

I did not know how to reach him, how to catch up with him...The land of tears is so mysterious.

Sorrow is one of the vibrations that prove the fact of living.

Mais, dans la mort d'un homme, un monde inconnu meurt, et je me demandais quelles étaient les images qui sombraient en lui.

One's suffering disappears when one lets oneself go, when one yields - even to sadness.

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

Perfection is not when there is no more to add, but no more to take away.

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

Only the unknown frightens men. But once a man has faced the unknown, that terror becomes the known.

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.

Life has meaning only if one barters it day by day for something other than itself

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

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

Once you are my friend, I am responsible for you.

Man is a knot a web a mesh into which relationships are tied. Only those relationships matter.

No single event can awaken within us a stranger totally unknown to us. To live is to be slowly born.

I have no right, by anything I do or say, to demean a human being in his own eyes. What matters is not what I think of him; it is what he thinks of himself. To undermine a man's self-respect is a sin.

I know but one freedom and that is the freedom of the mind.

It is not for us to forecast the future, but to shape it.