Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

“The meaning of things lies not in the things themselves, but in our attitude towards them.”

“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.”

“A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.”

“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.”

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

“True happiness comes from the joy of deeds well done, the zest of creating things new.”

“A rock pile ceases to be a rock pile the moment a single man contemplates it, bearing within him the image of a cathedral.”

“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.”

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

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

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

“For true love is inexhaustible the more you give, the more you have. And if you go to draw at the true fountainhead, the more water you draw, the more abundant is its flow.”

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

“'Men have forgotten this truth,' said the fox. 'But you must not forget it. You become responsible, forever, for what you have tamed.'”

“Once men are caught up in an event, they cease to be afraid. Only the unknown frightens men.”

“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.”

“Only the unknown frightens men. But once a man has faced the unknown, that terror becomes the known.”

“We say nothing essential about the cathedral when we speak of its stones. We say nothing essential about Man when we seek to define him by the qualities of men.”

“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.”

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

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