“"I swear that what I went through, no animal would have gone through." 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.”

— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

Ch III : The Tool
Terre des Hommes (1939)

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Antoine de Saint-Exupéry 38

French writer and aviator 1900–1944

Related quotes

“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)

“In my sentences I go where no man has gone before.”

George W. Bush (1946) 43rd President of the United States

“Through our sentences and paragraphs long-gone ghosts still have their say within the collective mind.”

Howard Bloom (1943) American publicist and author

Source: Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century (2000), Ch.8 Reality is a Shared Hallucination

“Logic is not concerned with human behavior in the same sense that physiology, psychology, and social sciences are concerned with it. These sciences formulate laws or universal statements which have as their subject matter human activities as processes in time. Logic, on the contrary, is concerned with relations between factual sentences (or thoughts). If logic ever discusses the truth of factual sentences it does so only conditionally, somewhat as follows: if such-and-such a sentence is true, then such-and-such another sentence is true. Logic itself does not decide whether the first sentence is true, but surrenders that question to one or the other of the empirical sciences.”

Rudolf Carnap (1891–1970) German philosopher

Rudolf Carnap (1937) cited in: Irving J. Lee (1967) The Language of Wisdom and Folly: Background Readings in Semantics. International Society for General Semantics, p. 44

“I moved through the days like a severed head that finishes a sentence.”

Amy Hempel (1951) Short story writer

“I read a sentence. And I closed the Bible, because that was it. And then I saw the thing as a whole. And it fulfilled this vision for me, 100 percent.
I don't think I'll ever say what that sentence was.”

David Lynch book Catching the Big Fish

Eraserhead, p. 33
Catching the Big Fish (2006)
Context: Eraserhead is my most spiritual movie. No one understands when I say that, but it is.
Eraserhead was growing in a certain way, and I didn't know what it meant. I was looking for a key to unlock what these sequences were saying. Of course, I understood some of it; but I didn't know the thing that just pulled it all together. And it was a struggle. So I got out my Bible and I started reading. And one day, I read a sentence. And I closed the Bible, because that was it. And then I saw the thing as a whole. And it fulfilled this vision for me, 100 percent.
I don't think I'll ever say what that sentence was.