Quotes by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

In one of the stars I shall be living. In one of them I shall be laughing. And so it will be as if all the stars were laughing, when you look at the sky at night . . . You--only you--will have stars that can laugh! ...And when your sorrow is comforted (time soothes all sorrows) you will be content that you have known me. You will always be my friend. You will want to laugh with me. And you will sometimes open your window, so, for that pleasure . . . And your friends will be properly astonished to see you laughing as you look at at the sky! Then you will say to them, Yes, the stars always make me laugh! And they will think you are crazy. It will be a very shabby trick that I shall have played on you . . .

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

I did not know what to say to him. I felt awkward and blundering. I did not know how I could reach him, where I could overtake him and go on hand in hand with him once more.

One day, you said to me, I saw the sunset forty-four times!And a little later you added:You know-- one loves the sunet, when one is so sad...Were you so sad, then? I asked, on the day of the forty-four sunsets?But the little prince made no reply.

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

I may be a little like the grown-ups. I must have grown old.

To be a man is, precisely, to be responsible. It is to feel shame at the sight of what seems to be unmerited misery. It is to take pride in a victory won by ones comrades. It is to feel, when setting ones stone, that one is contributing to the building of the world.

Men? One never knows where to find them. The wind blows them away. They have no roots, and that makes their life very difficult.

I picked up one and then a second and then a third of these stones, finding them at about the rate of one stone to the acre. And here is where my adventure became magical, for in a striking foreshortening of time that embraced thousands of years, I had become the witness of this miserly rain from the stars. the marvel of marvels was that there on the rounded back of the planet, between this magnetic sheet and those stars, a human consciousness was present in which as in a mirror that rain could be reflected.

Where are the people?” resumed the little prince at last. “It’s a little lonely in the desert…” “It is lonely when you’re among people, too,” said the snake.

To forget a friend is sad. Not everyone has had a friend.

Where are the men?” the little prince at last took up the conversationagain. “It is a little lonely in the desert. . . ”“It is also lonely among men,” the snake said.

there is no growth except in the fulfillment of obligations

even so did you feel yourself swept away by that inward migration about which no one had ever said a word to you…A great wind swept through and delivered from the matrix the sleeping prince you sheltered- man within you. You are the equal of the musician composing his music, of the physicist extending the frontier of knowledge…you have reached an altitude where all loves are of the same stuff.

We do not pray for immortality, but only not to see our acts and all things stripped suddenly of all their meaning; for then it is the utter emptiness of everything reveals itself.

And the voice spoke even more deliberately: ...but remember what is under the ocean of clouds: eternity.And suddenly that tranquil world, the world of such simple harmony that you discover as you rise above the clouds, took on an unfamiliar quality in my eyes. All that gentleness became a trap. In my minds eye I saw that vast white trap laid out, right under my feet. Beneath it reigned neither the restlessness of men nor the living tumult and motion of cities, as one might have thought, but a silence that was even more absolute, a more final peace. That viscous whiteness was turning before my eyes into the boundary between the real and the unreal, between the known and the unknowable. And I was already beginning to sense that a spectacle has no meaning except when seen through a culture, a civilization, a professional craft.

Language is the source of misunderstandings.

Why are you drinking? demanded the little prince.So that I may forget, replied the tippler.Forget what? inquired the little prince, who was already sorry for him.Forget that I am ashamed, the tippler confessed, hanging his head.Ashamed of what? insisted the little prince, who wanted to help him.Ashamed of drinking!

In silence alone does a mans truth bind itself together and strike root.

I dont much like assuming the tone of a moralist. But the danger of baobabs is so little recognized, and the risks run by anyone who might get lost on an asteroid are so considerable, that for once I am making an exception to my habitual reserve.