ANTOINE DE SAINT-EXUPERY

You become responsible, forever, for what you have tamed.

War is not an adventure. It is a disease. It is like typhus.

It is in the compelling zest of high adventure and of victory, and in creative action, that man finds his supreme joys.

If you want to build a ship, don't drum up people to collect wood and don't assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.

And now here is my secret, a very simple secret: it is only with the heart that one can see rightly, what is essential is invisible to the eye.

The aeroplane has unveiled for us the true face of the earth.

Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.

A civilization is built on what is required of men, not on that which is provided for them.

One can be a brother only in something. Where there is no tie that binds men, men are not united but merely lined up.

The machine does not isolate man from the great problems of nature but plunges him more deeply into them.

Each man must look to himself to teach him the meaning of life. It is not something discovered: it is something molded.

Love does not consist in gazing at each other, but in looking outward together in the same direction.

He who has gone, so we but cherish his memory, abides with us, more potent, nay, more present than the living man.

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

The one thing that matters is the effort.

Whoever loves above all the approach of love will never know the joy of attaining it.

A civilization is a heritage of beliefs, customs, and knowledge slowly accumulated in the course of centuries, elements difficult at times to justify by logic, but justifying themselves as paths when they lead somewhere, since they open up for man his inner distance.

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.

Perfection is finally attained not when there is no longer anything to add but when there is no longer anything to take away, when a body has been stripped down to its nakedness.

Tell me who admires and loves you, and I will tell you who you are.

Grown-ups never understand anything for themselves, and it is tiresome for children to be always and forever explaining things to them.

It is such a secret place, the land of tears.

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

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.

No single event can awaken within us a stranger totally unknown to us. To live is to be slowly born. It would be a bit too easy if we could go about borrowing ready-made souls.