18 quotes
Transport of the mails, transport of the human voice, transport of flickering pictures — in this century, as in others, our highest accomplishments still have the single aim of bringing men together.
Terre des Hommes (1939)
Human drama does not show itself on the surface of life. It is not played out in the visible world, but in the hearts of men.
Terre des Hommes (1939)
It seems to me that those who complain of man's progress confuse ends with means.
Terre des Hommes (1939)
But you want to remember that below the sea of clouds lies eternity.
Terre des Hommes (1939)
It is another of the miraculous things about mankind that there is no pain nor passion that does not radiate to the ends of the earth. Let a man in a garret but burn with enough intensity and he will set fire to the world.
Terre des Hommes (1939)
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.
Terre des Hommes (1939)
Have you looked at a modern airplane? Have you followed from year to year the evolution of its lines?
Terre des Hommes (1939)
In anything at all, perfection is finally attained not when there is no longer anything to add, but when there is no longer anything to take away, when a body has been stripped down to its nakedness.
Terre des Hommes (1939)
No man can draw a free breath who does not share with other men a common and disinterested ideal. Life has taught us that love does not consist in gazing at each other but in looking outward together in the same direction.
Terre des Hommes (1939)
Contrary to the vulgar illusion, it is thanks to the metal, and by virtue of it, that the pilot rediscovers nature. As I have already said, the machine does not isolate man from the great problems of nature but plunges him more deeply into them.
Terre des Hommes (1939)
I had a vision of the face of destiny.
Terre des Hommes (1939)
You have chosen not to be perturbed by great problems, having trouble enough to forget your own fate as man. You are not the dweller upon an errant planet and do not ask yourself questions to which there are no answers.
Terre des Hommes (1939)
Life has taught us that love does not consist in gazing at each other but in looking outward together in the same direction. (Translated by Lewis Galantière in "Wind, Sand and Stars")
Terre des Hommes (1939)
"I swear that what I went through, no animal would have gone through." This sentence, the noblest ever spoken, this sentence that defines man's place in the universe, that honors him, that re-establishes the true hierarchy, floated back into my thoughts.
Terre des Hommes (1939)
The magic of the craft has opened for me a world in which I shall confront, within two hours, the black dragons and the crowned crests of a coma of blue lightnings, and when night has fallen I, delivered, shall read my course in the stars.
Terre des Hommes (1939)
This viscous whiteness became in my mind the frontier between the real and the unreal, between the known and the unknowable. Already I was beginning to realize that a spectacle has no meaning except it be seen through the glass of a culture, a civilization, a craft.
Terre des Hommes (1939)
Each man must look to himself to teach him the meaning of life. It is not something discovered: it is something molded. These prison walls that this age of trade has built up round us, we can break down. We can still run free, call to our comrades, and marvel to hear once more, in response to our call, the impassioned chant of the human voice.
Terre des Hommes (1939)
All of us, in words that contradict each other, express at bottom the same exalted impulse. What sets us against one another is not our aims — they all come to the same thing — but our methods, which are the fruit of our varied reasoning.
Terre des Hommes (1939)