Antoine de Saint-Exupery Biography Quotes 40 Report mistakes

Early Life
Antoine de Saint-Exupery was born on 29 June 1900 in Lyon, France, into a family with noble antecedents and a strong sense of tradition. His father, Jean de Saint-Exupery, died when Antoine was a small child, leaving his mother, Marie de Fonscolombe, to raise their children. She nurtured his affinity for drawing and storytelling, a pairing that would later become central to his most enduring work. Educated at Jesuit schools and, for a time, at Villa Saint-Jean in Fribourg, he grew into a reflective, inquisitive youth with a fascination for machines and the romance of exploration. He briefly studied architecture at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris after an unsuccessful attempt to enter the naval academy, a disappointment that quietly redirected him toward aviation.

Beginnings in Flight
Saint-Exupery began military service in 1921 and learned to fly at Strasbourg, obtaining his pilot's license the following year. After a period of wavering between civilian jobs and aviation, he returned decisively to flying, drawn by the nascent world of long-distance air routes. In the early 1920s he was briefly engaged to the writer Louise de Vilmorin, a relationship that ended but left echoes in his correspondence and sensibility. By 1926 he had joined the Latécoère network that would become Aeropostale, committing himself to the risks and ethics of airmail work.

Aeropostale and the Sahara
The Aeropostale years made him both a disciplined professional and a philosophically minded observer of danger, duty, and camaraderie. Based in Toulouse and on routes to North Africa and South America, he served under the demanding operations chief Didier Daurat and worked alongside celebrated pilots such as Jean Mermoz and Henri Guillaumet. As station chief at Cap Juby on the edge of the Sahara, he mediated with local authorities and tribes to secure the release of downed aviators. The desert's stark immensities and the moral code of pilots forged a worldview that emphasized responsibility to others, calm in the face of hazard, and a reverence for human ties amid vast, indifferent spaces.

Emergence as a Writer
While flying, Saint-Exupery began to publish fiction and reportage. Courrier sud (1929), a novel set along the mail routes, established his voice. Vol de nuit (Night Flight, 1931) followed and won the Prix Femina, distilling the tension between individual fear and the collective imperative of keeping open the line that connected distant communities. He married Consuelo Suncin in 1931; their passionate, complex relationship, alternately tender and stormy, contributed motifs that later shaped the rose in The Little Prince. Throughout the 1930s he continued to write essays and narratives that braided memoir with philosophical reflection.

Crashes, Survival, and Creative Renewal
In December 1935, attempting to break the Paris, Saigon speed record with his mechanic Andre Prevot, Saint-Exupery crashed in the Libyan desert. After days of dehydration and hallucination, the two men were rescued by a Bedouin. The experience deepened his preoccupation with chance, fate, and the lifelines between strangers. Terre des hommes (Wind, Sand and Stars, 1939) drew on such episodes, including Guillaumet's survival in the Andes, and won the Grand Prix of the Academie francaise as well as a National Book Award in the United States. A serious crash in 1938 near Guatemala City left him with lasting injuries, complicating his flying but sharpening his awareness of bodily fragility and resilience.

War, Exile, and The Little Prince
With the outbreak of World War II, Saint-Exupery rejoined the French Air Force as a reconnaissance pilot. After the 1940 defeat, he made his way to the United States by way of North Africa and Portugal. In New York he sought support for the Allied cause while resisting factional politics, an ambivalence that put him at odds with some Gaullists and with Charles de Gaulle's circle but won admiration from those, like publisher Eugene Reynal and colleagues at Reynal & Hitchcock, who valued his independence. In this period he wrote Pilote de guerre (Flight to Arras, 1942), a sober account of wartime missions, and Lettre a un otage (Letter to a Hostage), addressed to his friend Leon Werth. In 1943, he published in New York the French and English editions of Le Petit Prince, which he wrote and illustrated himself. The book's parable-like simplicity encodes themes that had occupied him since Aeropostale: responsibility as the wellspring of love, the unseen bonds that give life meaning, and the child's gaze as a corrective to adult blindness.

Final Missions and Disappearance
Despite injuries and age, Saint-Exupery insisted on returning to operational flying. He joined a Free French reconnaissance unit operating with the Allies in the Mediterranean theater and trained on the Lockheed F-5, the unarmed photographic version of the P-38. On 31 July 1944 he took off from Borgo in Corsica on a mission over southeastern France and did not return. For decades the circumstances of his disappearance remained a mystery. Debris identified as his aircraft was later found in the Mediterranean near Marseille, but the precise cause of the crash has not been definitively established. The image of the aviator-writer vanishing into the sea resonated with the stoic, fatalistic strain that runs through his work.

Posthumous Legacy
After the war, friends, editors, and guardians of his reputation, among them Gaston Gallimard and Nelly de Vogue, helped bring to print Citadelle (The Wisdom of the Sands, 1948), assembled from notebooks he had been shaping for years. Consuelo de Saint-Exupery also published a memoir that cast new light on their marriage and on the emotional sources of his imagery. As The Little Prince traveled across languages and generations to become one of the most translated and beloved books in the world, readers rediscovered the prose of the aviator who had written not as an escape from life but as an extension of the obligations he felt to other human beings.

Works and Themes
Saint-Exupery's corpus spans novels, essays, war reportage, and fables. Courrier sud and Vol de nuit crystallize the ethos of Aeropostale; Terre des hommes blends adventure narrative with metaphysical inquiry; Pilote de guerre captures the shock and dignity of defeat; Lettre a un otage is an address to friendship under persecution; Le Petit Prince, with its watercolors and aphoristic wisdom, marries childlike form to adult gravity; and Citadelle offers a posthumous, aphoristic testament on leadership, community, and inner discipline. His friendships with pilots like Henri Guillaumet and Jean Mermoz, his collaborations with editors such as Gaston Gallimard, his ties to Consuelo, and his lifelong loyalty to people like Leon Werth all fed a literature where courage, fidelity, and imagination support one another.

Across flight lines, deserts, and wartime skies, Antoine de Saint-Exupery fashioned an art that holds technical precision and poetic amplitude in equilibrium. The pilot who traced thin lines across maps pursued, in prose and drawings, another kind of navigation: toward a moral geography in which responsibility to others is the true north.

Our collection contains 40 quotes who is written by Antoine, under the main topics: Motivational - Ethics & Morality - Wisdom - Friendship - Love.

• 1948 Citadel (Book)
• 1943 Letter to a Hostage (Essay)
• 1943 The Little Prince (Novella)
• 1942 Flight to Arras (Non-fiction)
• 1939 Wind, Sand and Stars (Memoir)
• 1931 Night Flight (Novel)
• 1929 Southern Mail (Novel)