If you want to build a ship, don't drum up people to collect wood and don't assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea. 'Men have forgotten this truth,' said the fox. 'But you must not forget it. You become responsible, forever, for what you have tamed.' A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away. To be a man is, precisely, to be responsible. 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. For true love is inexhaustible; the more you give, the more you have. And if you go to draw at the true fountainhead, the more water you draw, the more abundant is its flow. A civilization is built on what is required of men, not on that which is provided for them. True happiness comes from the joy of deeds well done, the zest of creating things new.

A chief is a man who assumes responsibility. He says 'I was beaten,' he does not say 'My men were beaten.' Tell me who admires and loves you, and I will tell you who you are. No single event can awaken within us a stranger totally unknown to us. To live is to be slowly born. It would be a bit too easy if we could go about borrowing ready-made souls. I have no right, by anything I do or say, to demean a human being in his own eyes. What matters is not what I think of him; it is what he thinks of himself. To undermine a man's self-respect is a sin. Only the unknown frightens men. But once a man has faced the unknown, that terror becomes the known.

One can be a brother only in something. Where there is no tie that binds men, men are not united but merely lined up. The time for action is now. It's never too late to do something. Love does not consist in gazing at each other, but in looking outward together in the same direction. Life has meaning only if one barters it day by day for something other than itself. When you give yourself, you receive more than you give.

He who has gone, so we but cherish his memory, abides with us, more potent, nay, more present than the living man. The aeroplane has unveiled for us the true face of the earth. Charity never humiliated him who profited from it, nor ever bound him by the chains of gratitude, since it was not to him but to God that the gift was made. Grown-ups never understand anything for themselves, and it is tiresome for children to be always and forever explaining things to them. We say nothing essential about the cathedral when we speak of its stones. We say nothing essential about Man when we seek to define him by the qualities of men.

War is not an adventure. It is a disease. It is like typhus. Only he can understand what a farm is, what a country is, who shall have sacrificed part of himself to his farm or country, fought to save it, struggled to make it beautiful. Only then will the love of farm or country fill his heart. I know but one freedom, and that is the freedom of the mind. The one thing that matters is the effort. How could there be any question of acquiring or possessing, when the one thing needful for a man is to become - to be at last, and to die in the fullness of his being.

What saves a man is to take a step. Then another step. It is always the same step, but you have to take it. A civilization is a heritage of beliefs, customs, and knowledge slowly accumulated in the course of centuries, elements difficult at times to justify by logic, but justifying themselves as paths when they lead somewhere, since they open up for man his inner distance. The notion of looking on at life has always been hateful to me. What am I if I am not a participant? In order to be, I must participate. The machine does not isolate man from the great problems of nature but plunges him more deeply into them. The meaning of things lies not in the things themselves, but in our attitude towards them.