xy
@xy, member from Sept. 25, 2023“I know but one freedom and that is the freedom of the mind.”
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (1900–1944) French writer and aviator
“Love does not consist of gazing at each other, but in looking together in the same direction.”
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (1900–1944) French writer and aviator
“It is the time you have wasted for your rose that makes your rose so important.”
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry book The Little Prince
Source: The Little Prince, Chapter 21
“I swear that what I went through, no animal would have gone through.”
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (1900–1944) French writer and aviator
This sentence, the noblest ever spoken, this sentence that defines man's place in the universe, that honors him, that re-establishes the true hierarchy, floated back into my thoughts.
Ch III : The Tool
Terre des Hommes (1939)
“A goal without a plan is just a wish.”
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (1900–1944) French writer and aviator
The earliest appearance yet located of this statement is in 50 Ways to Lose Ten Pounds (1995) by Joan Horbiak, p. 95, where it is quoted as an anonymous proverb. It seems to have circulated as such for a few years before it began to be attributed to Saint Exupéry around 2007.
Disputed
“Your task is not to foresee the future, but to enable it.”
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (1900–1944) French writer and aviator
Citadelle or The Wisdom of the Sands (1948)
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (1900–1944) French writer and aviator
1939 translation:
We can still run free, call to our comrades, and marvel to hear once more, in response to our call, the pathetic chant of the human voice.
Source: Terre des Hommes (1939), Ch. II : The Men, as quoted in The Lyric Self in Zen and E.E. Cummings (2015) by Michael Buland Burns and Rima Snyder, p. 72
“Even our misfortunes are a part of our belongings”
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (1900–1944) French writer and aviator
Vol de Nuit (1931) (translated into English as Night Flight)
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry book The Little Prince
Les grandes personnes ne comprennent jamais rien toutes seules, et c'est fatigant, pour les enfants, de toujours leur donner des explications.
Le Petit Prince (1943)
“What makes the desert beautiful is that it hides, somewhere, a well.”
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry book The Little Prince
Ce qui embellit le désert, dit le petit prince, c'est qu'il cache un puits quelque part...
Le Petit Prince (1943)
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (1900–1944) French writer and aviator
Source: Citadelle or The Wisdom of the Sands (1948), p. 152
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (1900–1944) French writer and aviator
Ch III : The Tool
Terre des Hommes (1939)
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (1900–1944) French writer and aviator
Ch III : The Tool
Terre des Hommes (1939)
Context: !-- There was a time when a flyer sat at the centre of a complicated works. Flight set us factory problems. The indicators that oscillated on the instrument panel warned us of a thousand dangers. But in the machine of today we forget that motors are whirring: the motor, finally, has come to fulfil its function, which is to whirr as a heart beats—and we give no thought to the beating of our heart. Thus, --> Precisely because it is perfect the machine dissembles its own existence instead of forcing itself upon our notice.
And thus, also, the realities of nature resume their pride of place. It is not with metal that the pilot is in contact. Contrary to the vulgar illusion, it is thanks to the metal, and by virtue of it, that the pilot rediscovers nature. As I have already said, the machine does not isolate man from the great problems of nature but plunges him more deeply into them.
Numerous, nevertheless, are the moralists who have attacked the machine as the source of all the ills we bear, who, creating a fictitious dichotomy, have denounced the mechanical civilization as the enemy of the spiritual civilization.
If what they think were really so, then indeed we should have to despair of man, for it would be futile to struggle against this new advancing chaos. The machine is certainly as irresistible in its advance as those virgin forests that encroach upon equatorial domains.
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (1900–1944) French writer and aviator
Source: Terre des Hommes (1939), Ch. IX Barcelona and Madrid (1936)<!-- * L’expérience nous montre qu’aimer ce n’est point nous regarder l’un l’autre mais regarder ensemble dans la même direction. /** Life has taught us that love does not consist in gazing at each other but in looking outward together in the same direction.-->
Context: No man can draw a free breath who does not share with other men a common and disinterested ideal. Life has taught us that love does not consist in gazing at each other but in looking outward together in the same direction. There is no comradeship except through union in the same high effort. Even in our age of material well-being this must be so, else how should we explain the happiness we feel in sharing our last crust with others in the desert? No sociologist's textbook can prevail against this fact. Every pilot who has flown to the rescue of a comrade in distress knows that all joys are vain in comparison with this one. And this, it may be, is the reason why the world today is tumbling about our ears. It is precisely because this sort of fulfilment is promised each of us by his religion, that men are inflamed today. All of us, in words that contradict each other, express at bottom the same exalted impulse. What sets us against one another is not our aims — they all come to the same thing — but our methods, which are the fruit of our varied reasoning.
Let us, then, refrain from astonishment at what men do. One man finds that his essential manhood comes alive at the sight of self-sacrifice, cooperative effort, a rigorous vision of justice, manifested in an anarchist's cellar in Barcelona. For that man there will henceforth be but one truth — the truth of the anarchists. Another, having once mounted guard over a flock of terrified little nuns kneeling in a Spanish nunnery, will thereafter know a different truth — that it is sweet to die for the Church. If, when Mermoz plunged into the Chilean Andes with victory in his heart, you had protested to him that no merchant's letter could possibly be worth risking one's life for, Mermoz would have laughed in your face. Truth is the man that was born in Mermoz when he slipped through the Andean passes.