"Of what worth are convictions that bring not suffering?"
About this Quote
Convictions that never cost you anything are just preferences dressed up for the party. Saint-Exupery’s line is a moral shakedown: if your beliefs don’t generate friction - with authority, with comfort, with your own safety - then they’re likely ornamental. The phrasing is deliberately severe. “Of what worth” doesn’t ask whether convictions are nice to have; it interrogates their market value, their proof of purchase. “Bring not suffering” makes pain a kind of receipt, the evidence that a principle has actually been carried into the world where consequences live.
The subtext is less masochism than realism about commitment. A conviction, in his view, isn’t an internal mood board. It’s a decision that reroutes your behavior, and rerouting behavior collides with systems built to keep you obedient, complacent, or quietly self-interested. Suffering is the signal that you have stopped simply agreeing with yourself and started acting.
Context sharpens the edge. Saint-Exupery wrote out of a life spent in aviation, risk, and wartime disillusionment; he disappeared during a WWII reconnaissance mission. For someone who watched ideals get swallowed by propaganda and fear, the quote reads like an antidote to cheap hero-talk. It suggests that the only convictions worth admiring are those that survive the moment they become inconvenient: when they cost status, relationships, security, or certainty.
It also contains a warning: if your “principles” always align with your advantage, you may not have principles - just excellent timing.
The subtext is less masochism than realism about commitment. A conviction, in his view, isn’t an internal mood board. It’s a decision that reroutes your behavior, and rerouting behavior collides with systems built to keep you obedient, complacent, or quietly self-interested. Suffering is the signal that you have stopped simply agreeing with yourself and started acting.
Context sharpens the edge. Saint-Exupery wrote out of a life spent in aviation, risk, and wartime disillusionment; he disappeared during a WWII reconnaissance mission. For someone who watched ideals get swallowed by propaganda and fear, the quote reads like an antidote to cheap hero-talk. It suggests that the only convictions worth admiring are those that survive the moment they become inconvenient: when they cost status, relationships, security, or certainty.
It also contains a warning: if your “principles” always align with your advantage, you may not have principles - just excellent timing.
Quote Details
| Topic | Ethics & Morality |
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