Quotes from Antoine de Saint-Exupery

I shall look at you out of the corner of my eye, and you will say nothing. Words are the source of misunderstandings.

It is the time you have wasted for your rose that makes your rose so important.

A chief is a man who assumes responsibility. He says "I was beaten," he does not say "My men were beaten."

Pure logic is the ruin of the spirit.

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

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.

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.

Even our misfortunes are a part of our belongings.

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

Man is a knot into which relationships are tied.

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

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.

What saves a man is to take a step. Then another step. It is always the same step, but you have to take it.

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

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

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.

Living is being born slowly. It would be a little too easy if we could borrow ready-made souls.

One sees clearly only with the heart. Anything essential is invisible to the eyes.

A pile of rocks ceases to be a rock when somebody contemplates it with the idea of a cathedral in mind.

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.

What makes the desert beautiful is that somewhere it hides a well.

"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."

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

People haven't time to learn anything. They buy things ready-made in stores. But since there are no stores where you can buy friends, people no longer have friends.