Quotes by Aviators - Page 4

For millions of years flowers have been producing thorns. For millions of years sheep have been eating them all the same. And it's not serious, trying to understand why flowers go to such trouble to produce thorns that are good for nothing? It's not important, the war between the sheep and the flowers? It's no more serious and more important than the numbers that fat red gentleman is adding up? Suppose I happen to know a unique flower, one that exists nowhere in the world except on my planet, one that a little sheep can wipe out in a single bite one morning, just like that, without even realizing what he'd doing - that isn't important? If someone loves a flower of which just one example exists among all the millions and millions of stars, that's enough to make him happy when he looks at the stars. He tells himself 'My flower's up there somewhere...' But if the sheep eats the flower, then for him it's as if, suddenly, all the stars went out. And that isn't important?
Antoine De Saint Exupery
If I am attempting to describe him, it is in order not to forget him. It is sad to forget a friend. Not every one has had a friend.
Antoine De Saint Exupery
Courage is the price that life exacts for granting peace.
Amelia Earhart
But silence continued in the layers of the earth, and this density that I could feel at my shoulders continued harmonious, sustained, unaltered through eternity. I lay there pondering my situation, lost in the desert, and in danger, naked between sky and sand and stars, withdrawn by too much silence from the poles of my life.
Antoine De Saint Exupery
I looked about me. Luminous points glowed in the darkness. Cigarettes punctuated the humble meditations of worn old clerks. I heard them talking to one another in murmurs and whispers. They talked about illness, money, shabby domestic cares. And suddenly I had a vision of the face of destiny. Old bureaucrat, my comrade, it is not you who are to blame. No one ever helped you to escape. You, like a termite, built your peace by blocking up with cement every chink and cranny through which the light might pierce. You rolled yourself up into a ball in your genteel security, in routine, in the stifling conventions of provincial life, raising a modest rampart against the winds and the tides and the stars. You have chosen not to be perturbed by great problems, having trouble enough to forget your own fate as a man. You are not the dweller upon an errant planet and do not ask yourself questions to which there are no answers. Nobody grasped you by the shoulder while there was still time. Now the clay of which you were shaped has dried and hardened, and naught in you will ever awaken the sleeping musician, the poet, the astronomer that possibly inhabited you in the beginning.
Antoine De Saint Exupery
How is it possible for one to own the stars?""To whom do they belong?" the businessman retorted, peevishly."I don't know. To nobody.
Antoine De Saint Exupery
Flowers are so inconsistent!
Antoine De Saint Exupery
Of course I’ll hurt you. Of course you’ll hurt me. Of course we will hurt each other. But this is the very condition of existence. To become spring, means accepting the risk of winter. To become presence, means accepting the risk of absence.
Antoine De Saint Exupery
One of my favorite phobias is that girls, especially those whose tastes aren't routine, often don't get a fair break... It has come down through the generations, an inheritance of age-old customs which produced the corollary that women are bred to timidity.
Amelia Earhart
To forget a friend is sad. Not everyone has had a friend.
Antoine De Saint Exupery
Words are the source of misunderstandings.
Antoine De Saint Exupery
The way to find a needle in a haystack is to sit down.
Beryl Markham
A single event can awaken within us a stranger totally unknown to us. To live is to be slowly born.
Antoine De Saint Exupery
The woman who can create her own job is the one who will win fame and fortune.
Amelia Earhart
There are all kinds of silences and each of them means a different thing. There is the silence that comes with morning in a forest, and this is different from the silence of a sleeping city. There is silence after a rainstorm, and before a rainstorm, and these are not the same. There is the silence of emptiness, the silence of fear, the silence of doubt. There is a certain silence that can emanate from a lifeless object as from a chair lately used, or from a piano with old dust upon its keys, or from anything that has answered to the need of a man, for pleasure or for work. This kind of silence can speak. Its voice may be melancholy, but it is not always so; for the chair may have been left by a laughing child or the last notes of the piano may have been raucous and gay. Whatever the mood or the circumstance, the essence of its quality may linger in the silence that follows. It is a soundless echo.
Beryl Markham
So the little prince tamed the fox. And when the time for him to leave was approaching:"Oh!", said the fox. "I am going to cry.""It's your own fault," said the little prince. "I never wished you any harm; but you wanted me to tame you...""I know," said the fox."And now you're going to cry!" said the little prince."I know," said the fox."So you have gained nothing from it at all!""Yes, I have gained something," said the fox, "because of the colour of the corn.
Antoine De Saint Exupery
The fox is answering the Little Prince's question. What does that mean . . . tame? asks the Little Prince. Itmeans to establish ties. One only understands the things that one tames. Men have no more time to understand anything, they buy things all ready made at the shops, but there is no shop anywhere one can buy friendship.
Antoine De Saint Exupery
If you succeed in judging yourself rightly, then you are indeed a man of true wisdom.
Antoine De Saint Exupery
Him that I love, I wish to be free -- even from me.
Anne Morrow Lindbergh
Adventure is worthwhile in itself.
Amelia Earhart
You will have five hundred million little bells, and I shall have five hundred million springs of fresh water...
Antoine De Saint Exupery
The shape of my life is, of course, determined by many things; my background and childhood, my mind and its education, my conscience and its pressures, my heart and its desires.
Anne Morrow Lindbergh
If you come at four in the afternoon, I'll begin to be happy by three.
Antoine De Saint Exupery
If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work, and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.
Antoine De Saint Exupery
I am beginning to understand," said the little prince. "There is a flower... I think that she has tamed me...
Antoine De Saint Exupery
The four cornerstones of character on which the structure of this nation was built are: Initiative, Imagination, Individuality and Independence.
Edward Rickenbacker
If you love a flower that lives on a star, it is sweet to look at the sky at night. All the stars are a-bloom with flowers...
Antoine De Saint Exupery
It is the time you have wasted for your rose that makes your rose so important.
Antoine De Saint Exupery
Grown-ups love figures. When you talk to them about a new friend, they never ask questions about essential matters.
Antoine De Saint Exupery
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.
Antoine De Saint Exupery
Tell them that as soon as I can walk I'm going to fly!
Bessie Coleman
None of the characters in (the story) were distinguished ones -- not even the lion.He was an old lion, prepared from birth to lose his life rather than to leave it. But he had the dignity of all free creatures, and so he was allowed his moment. It was hardly a glorious moment.The two men who shot him were indifferent as men go, or perhaps they were less than that. At least they shot him without killing him, and then turned the unsconscionable eye of a camera upon his agony. It was a small, a stupid, but a callous crime.
Beryl Markham
The most self confident aces began to wonder when their turn would come.. Faced by the empty chairs of men you had laughed and joked with at lunch. And, miraculously, you were still there. Until tomorrow..
Cecil Lewis
Go and have another look at the roses. And you will understand that yours is indeed unique in all the world.
Antoine De Saint Exupery
I have found adventure in flying in world travel in business and even close at hand. ... Adventure is a state of mind-and spirit. It comes with faith for with complete faith there is no fear of what faces you in life or death.
Jacqueline Cochran
Good communication is as stimulating as black coffee and just as hard to sleep after.
Anne Morrow Lindbergh
As for the military advantage of such a bombardment, I simply cannot grasp it. I have seen housewives disemboweled, children mutilated; I have seen the old itinerant market crone sponge from her treasure the brains with which they were spattered. I have seen a janitor's wife come out of her cellar and douse the sullied pavement with a bucket of water, and I am still unable to understand what part these humble slaughterhouse accidents play in warfare.
Antoine De Saint Exupery
All living relationships are in process ofchange, of expansion, and must perpetually be building themselves new forms. But there is no singlefixed form to express such a changing relationship.
Anne Morrow Lindbergh
A chief is a man who assumes responsibility. He says 'I was beaten', he does not say 'My men were beaten.
Antoine De Saint Exupery
It's the time you spent on your rose that makes your rose so important...People have forgotten this truth, but you mustn't forget it. You become responsible forever for what you've tamed. You're responsible for your rose.
Antoine De Saint Exupery
The more one does and sees and feels the more one is able to do and the more genuine may be one's own appreciation of fundamental things like home and love and understanding companionship.
Amelia Earhart
People have forgotten this truth," the fox said. "But you mustn’t forget it. You become responsible forever for what you’ve tamed. You’re responsible for your rose.
Antoine De Saint Exupery
If a man has any greatness in him, it comes to light, not in one flamboyant hour, but in the ledger of his daily work.
Beryl Markham
What saves a man is to take a step. Then another step. It is always the same step but you have to take it.
Antoine De Saint Exupery
Life has a meaning only if one barters it day by day for something other than itself.
Antoine De Saint Exupery
What I see here is nothing but a shell. What is most important is invisible...
Antoine De Saint Exupery
I know a planet where there is a certain red-faced gentleman. He has never smelled a flower. He has never looked at a star. He has never loved any one. He has never done anything in his life but add up figures. And all day he says over and over, just like you: 'I am busy with matters of consequence!' And that makes him swell up with pride. But he is not a man - he is a mushroom!
Antoine De Saint Exupery
Voici mon secret. Il est très simple: on ne voit bien qu'avec le cœur. L'essentiel est invisible pour les yeux.
Antoine De Saint Exupery
When one wishes to play the wit, he sometimes wanders a little from the truth.
Antoine De Saint Exupery
Denys (Finch-Hatton) has been written about before and he will be written about again. If someone has not already said it, someone will say that he was a great man who never achieved greatness, and this will not only be trite, but wrong; he was a great man who never achieved arrogance.
Beryl Markham
That will be so amusing! You will have five hundred million little bells,and I shall have five hundred million springs of fresh water...
Antoine De Saint Exupery
But if you come at just any time, I shall never know at what hour my heart is to be ready to greet you.
Antoine De Saint Exupery
He is among those beings of great scope who spread their leafy branches willingly over broad horizons. To be a man is, precisely, to be responsible. It is to know shame at the sight of poverty which is not of our making. It is to be proud of a victory won by our comrades. It is to feel, as we place our stone, that we are contributing to the building of the world.
Antoine De Saint Exupery
In honoring the Wright Brothers, it is customary and proper to recognize their contribution to scientific progress. But I believe it is equally important to emphasize the qualities in their pioneering life and the character in man that such a life produced. The Wright Brothers balanced success with modesty, science with simplicity. At Kitty Hawk their intellects and senses worked in mutual support. They represented man in balance, and from that balance came wings to lift a world.
Charles A. Lindbergh
Love does not consist of gazing at each other, but in looking outward together in the same direction.
Antoine De Saint Exupery
When someone blushes, doesn't that mean 'yes'?
Antoine De Saint Exupery
To live without risk for me would be tantamount to death.
Jacqueline Cochran
A simple enough pleasure surely to have breakfast alone with one's husband but how seldom married people in the midst of life achieve it.
Anne Morrow Lindbergh
The proof that the little prince existed is that he was charming, that he laughed, and that he was looking for a sheep. If anybody wants a sheep, that is a proof that he exists.
Antoine De Saint Exupery
It seemed that the printers of the African maps had a slightly malicious habit of including, in large letters, the names of towns, junctions, and villages which, while most of them did exist in fact, as a group of thatched huts may exist or a water hole, they were usually so inconsequential as completely to escape discovery from the cockpit.
Beryl Markham