For he who makes for himself a fragile truth (such as preferring freedom to strict discipline, or discipline to freedom), since he fails to master the vagaries of a language whose words rebuff each other—such a man boils with rage when someone ventures to contradict him. If you shout loudly, it is because, your own language being inadequate, you want to drown others’ voices.
—Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Wisdom of the Sands
When I rescue you from the waves of the sea, I love you the better for this, being now responsible for your life. Or if I have watched over you and healed you when you were sick; or if it so happens that you were a trusty old servitor, helpful as a lamp; or even the herdsman of my flocks. Then I shall go and drink your goatsmilk in your house. I shall receive from you, and you shall give; you shall receive from me, and I shall give. But I have no truck with him who fiercely declares himself my equal and will neither depend on me in respect of anything or have me depend on him. Him alone I love whose death would wring my heart.
—Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Wisdom of the Sands
“I have written my poem. All that remains to do is correct it.”
But my father waxed wroth.
“So you write your poem first, and then correct it! But what is writing but correcting? What is the sculptor doing, if not correcting? Have you watched him modelling the clay? Correction by correction the face emerges; nay, the very first thumb-stroke was a correction of the primal lump. When I found my city, I ‘correct’ the barren wilderness. Then in the making I ‘correct’ my city. And correction by correction I follow the path that leads to God.”
—Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Wisdom of the Sands
And if each man chooses the site of the temple for himself, and places his stone wherever he thinks fit, you will never see a temple, only a huddle of stones.
—Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Wisdom of the Sands
For it is not the man we see, with his sorry husk of flesh and his farrago of ideas, who weighs in the scale of things; it is his soul, more or less vast as may be, with its climates and its mountain ranges, its oases of silence, its flowery slopes and melting snows and slumbrous pools—that territory unseen yet boundless wherein he proves his seigniory. From this secret source you draw your happiness, and once you know this there is no more turning from your course. For your navigation on a shallow river—even if you close your eyes and, letting its wavelets rock your boat, you picture vastness—is not the same as a voyage across the fathomless sea. Nor, though they may look alike, do you get the same pleasure from a false as from a real diamond. And the woman who merely holds her peace in your presence is not the same as she whose silence is deep as the sea. Nor can you fail to perceive this.
—Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Wisdom of the Sands
But, mark my words, the man who cannot see that receiving is very different from accepting is blind indeed. Receiving is, above all, a gift, the gift of oneself, and I could not call him a miser who refuses to ruin himself with presents; the miser is one who bestows not the light of his countenance in return for your largesse. And miserly is the soil which does not clothe itself in beauty when you have strewn your seed upon it.
—Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Wisdom of the Sands
… to the mind of the majority, whatever is given in one place is stolen from elsewhere; it is their dealings in the marketplace and their forgetfulness of God that have thus shaped their minds. Yet, in reality, what you give does not lessen your store; far otherwise, it augments for you the riches you can distribute. Thus he who loves all men, by grace of his love of God, loves each man vastly more than he who, loving but one of them, extends merely to his partner the paltry field of himself.
—Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Wisdom of the Sands
Thus, too, love is no sure resting place if it does not transform itself from day to day, like a child in the womb. But you, my sedate friend, propose to loll in your gondola and to become the gondolier’s song for all your days; wherein you dupe yourself. For all that is neither ascent nor a transition lacks significance. And when you halt on the way, you will have no joy of it; for the landscape will have nothing more to tell you. Then you will discard the woman; whereas you should have begun by discarding your old self.
—Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Wisdom of the Sands
But them I call the rabble who hang on others’ words and gestures, and, chamelon-wise, take their color from them, truckling to their benefactors, relishing applause, and making themselves the mirror of the multitude. Never do you find such men faithful wardens of their heritage, like a citadel; nor do they hand down their password from generation to generation; but rather let their children grow at random, without molding them. And everywhere they breed, like fungus, on the face of the earth.
—Antoine de Saint-Exupery, The Wisdom of the Sands
If the Church doesn’t disciple the nation, the nation will disciple the Church.