Skip to content

Your task is not to foresee the future, but to enable it.

— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry Citadelle or The Wisdom of the Sands (1948)

L'avenir, tu n'as point à le prévoir mais à le permettre.

Original text (French)

Another quote →

Topics

Future

More quotes by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

A rock pile ceases to be a rock pile the moment a single man contemplates it, bearing within him the image of a cathedral.

Pilote de Guerre (1942)

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)

All Antoine de Saint-Exupéry quotes →

You may also like

A generation which ignores history has no past —and no future.

Robert A. Heinlein Time Enough for Love (1973)

From now on, everything in life will appear blurry to me. What’s the point of wiping my glasses when my vision has already left me?"

Sanu Sharma

You can never plan the future by the past.

Edmund Burke A Letter to a Member of the National Assembly (1791)

If we don’t care about our past we can’t have very much hope for our future.

Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.