"Experience will guide us to the rules. You cannot make rules precede practical experience."
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Antoine de Saint-Exupery quotes (page 3 of 18)
358 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"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 up 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."
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"You give birth to that on which you fix your mind"
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"All men have the stars," he answered, "but they are not the same things for different people. For some, who are travellers, the stars are guides. For others they are no more than little lights in the sky. For others, who are scholars, they are problems. For my businessman they were wealth. But all the stars are silent. You--you alone--will have the stars as no one else has them--"
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"A man's age is something impressive, it sums up his life: maturity reached slowly and against many obstacles, illnesses cured, griefs and despairs overcome, and unconscious risks taken; maturity formed through so many desires, hopes, regrets, forgotten things, loves. A man's age represents a fine cargo of experience and memories."
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"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."
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"Night, when words fade and things come alive."
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"Tell me who admires and loves you, and I will tell you who you are."
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"The tree is more than first a seed, then a stem, then a living trunk, and then dead timber. The tree is a slow, enduring force straining to win the sky."
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"I fly because it releases my mind from the tyranny of petty things."
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"A single event can awaken within us a stranger totally unknown to us."
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"There is no hope of joy except in human relations."
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"Truth is not that which is demonstrable but that which is ineluctable."
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"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."
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"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."
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"How could drops of water know themselves to be a river? Yet the river flows on."
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"It is such a secret place, the land of tears."
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"I have lived a great deal among grown-ups. I have seen them intimately, close at hand. And that hasn’t much improved my opinion of them."
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"I will appoint captains to rule my cities, for it is in the compelling zest of high adventure and of victory, and in creative action, that man finds his supreme joys."
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"I know but one freedom and that is the freedom of the mind."
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