Love Quote by Antoine de Saint-Exupery

Saint-Exupery’s line cuts against the romantic cult of anticipation: the idea that the best part of love is the tremble before it becomes real. He’s warning that if you fetishize the runway lights - the flirting, the yearning, the carefully managed almost - you’ll sabotage the landing. In his world, love isn’t a mood; it’s a commitment with consequences. The “approach” is intoxicating precisely because it’s unaccountable: you can project anything onto it, keep your options open, and stay protected from the messiness of daily devotion.

The subtext is about risk and cowardice disguised as sensitivity. Loving the approach “above all” reads like a preference for controlled intensity over actual intimacy. Attainment, by contrast, is awkward and concrete. It demands decisions, patience, and the willingness to be seen in unglamorous light. Saint-Exupery suggests that people who chase the prelude aren’t “romantics” so much as connoisseurs of safe longing - collectors of beginnings who refuse the moral weight of continuance.

Context matters. As an aviator and a writer shaped by duty, war, and disappearance, Saint-Exupery repeatedly treats human bonds as work: fragile, built, maintained. The seduction of the approach mirrors the seduction of escape - the beautiful moment before responsibility. His phrasing makes “joy” sound earned, not stumbled upon. Love arrives as a verb, not a weather pattern, and you don’t get to keep the thrill of takeoff if you never intend to touch down.