Antoine de Saint-Exupery Quotes

Death focuses the mind on the things that really matter: why are we here, and what should we do?

The meaning of life is life.

Life is essentially a question of values.

Nothing is a matter of life and death except life and death.

'Do I have a purpose.' Right. And of course you do. Otherwise, you wouldn't be on Earth. I really strongly believe that if we're here, it's for a reason.

Nothing is more important than life. Nothing. You realise the simplicity of that point only when you confront death everyday.

I don't wonder about anything. I'm too old to wonder. I think the most important thing is to wake-up with a pulse. I look in the obituary columns. If I'm not in it, I get out of bed.

I don't know how one should live - but I know that one should live.

Is death that which gives meaning to life?

But what is life if you don't live it?

I don't know if I was put on this Earth for a purpose or not. But I'm fairly confident that I'll be taken off of it for one.

Why should I live? Why should I do anything? Is there in life any purpose which the inevitable death that awaits me does not undo and destroy?

It is worth while dying, to find out what life is.

Is death that which gives meaning to life? And I said, no, life is that which gives meaning to life.

I'm not afraid of death. It's the stake one puts up in order to play the game of life.

I think life's an irrational obsession.

I have a rendezvous with life.

But human beings fall easily into despair, and from the very beginning we invented stories that enabled us to place our lives in a larger setting, that revealed an underlying pattern, and gave us a sense that, against all the depressing and chaotic evidence to the contrary, life had meaning and value.

Our business is with life, not death.

Here is the test to find whether your mission on Earth is finished: if you're alive, it isn't.

Life is generally something that happens elsewhere.

It is nothing to die. It is frightful not to live.

I have a calling in my soul, if you like, to try to make my life in some way worthwhile. What is the value of my existence?

There is only one meaning of life: the act of living itself.

Everything has been figured out, except how to live.