Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

People have forgotten this truth," the fox said. "But you mustn__ forget it. You become responsible forever for what you__e tamed. You__e responsible for your rose.

And the voice spoke even more deliberately: '...but remember what is under the ocean of clouds: eternity.'And suddenly that tranquil world, the world of such simple harmony that you discover as you rise above the clouds, took on an unfamiliar quality in my eyes. All that gentleness became a trap. In my mind's eye I saw that vast white trap laid out, right under my feet. Beneath it reigned neither the restlessness of men nor the living tumult and motion of cities, as one might have thought, but a silence that was even more absolute, a more final peace. That viscous whiteness was turning before my eyes into the boundary between the real and the unreal, between the known and the unknowable. And I was already beginning to sense that a spectacle has no meaning except when seen through a culture, a civilization, a professional craft.

We do not pray for immortality, but only not to see our acts and all things stripped suddenly of all their meaning; for then it is the utter emptiness of everything reveals itself.

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.

there is no growth except in the fulfillment of obligations

Please-tame me!' he said.'I want to, very much,' the little prince replied. 'But I have not much time. I have friends to discover, and a great many things to understand.''One only understands the things that one tames,' said the fox. 'Men have no more time to understand anything. They buy things all ready made at the shops. But there is no shop anywhere where one can buy friendship, and so men have no friends any more. If you want a friend, tame me.''What must I do, to tame you?' asked the little prince.'You must be very patient,' replied the fox. 'First you will sit down at a little distance from me-like that-in the grass. I shall look at you out of the corner of my eye, and you will say nothing. Words are the source of misunderstandings. But you will sit a little closer to me, every day...

Where are the men?_ the little prince at last took up the conversationagain. __t is a little lonely in the desert. . . ___t is also lonely among men,_ the snake said.

Where are the people?_ resumed the little prince at last. __t__ a little lonely in the desert_ __t is lonely when you__e among people, too,_ said the snake.

To forget a friend is sad. Not everyone has had a friend.

It is the time you have wasted for your rose that makes your rose so important.

I picked up one and then a second and then a third of these stones, finding them at about the rate of one stone to the acre. And here is where my adventure became magical, for in a striking foreshortening of time that embraced thousands of years, I had become the witness of this miserly rain from the stars. the marvel of marvels was that there on the rounded back of the planet, between this magnetic sheet and those stars, a human consciousness was present in which as in a mirror that rain could be reflected.

I am beginning to understand," said the little prince. "There is a flower... I think that she has tamed me...

You are beautiful, but you are empty. One could not die for you. To be sure, an ordinary passerby would think that my rose looked just like you --- the rose that belongs to me. But in herself alone she is more important than all the hundreds of you other roses: because it is she that I have watered; because it is she that I have put under the glass globe; because it is she that I have sheltered behind the screen; because it is for her that I have killed the caterpillars; because it is she that I have listened to, when she grumbled, or bloated, or even sometimes when she said nothing. Because she is my rose.

Men? One never knows where to find them. The wind blows them away. They have no roots, and that makes their life very difficult.

To be a man is, precisely, to be responsible. It is to feel shame at the sight of what seems to be unmerited misery. It is to take pride in a victory won by one's comrades. It is to feel, when setting one's stone, that one is contributing to the building of the world.

I may be a little like the grown-ups. I must have grown old.

When one wishes to play the wit, he sometimes wanders a little from the truth.

One day," you said to me, "I saw the sunset forty-four times!"And a little later you added:"You know-- one loves the sunet, when one is so sad...""Were you so sad, then?" I asked, "on the day of the forty-four sunsets?"But the little prince made no reply.