The Little Prince – Character Quotes

"Your planet is very beautiful," he said.
"Has it any oceans?"
"I couldn't tell you," said the geographer.
"Ah!" The Little Prince was disappointed.
"Has it any mountains?"
"I couldn't tell you," said the geographer.
"And towns, and rivers, and deserts?"
"I couldn't tell you that, either."
"But you are a geographer!"
"Exactly," the geographer said.
"But I am not an explorer.
I haven't a single explorer on my planet.
It is not the geographer who goes out to count the towns, the rivers, the mountains, the seas, the oceans, and the deserts.
The geographer is much too important to go loafing about.
He does not leave his desk."

I know a planet where there is a certain red-faced gentleman. He has never smelled a flower.
He has never looked at a star.
He has never loved any one.
He has never done anything in his life but add up figures.
And all day he says over and over, just like you:
'I am busy with matters of consequence!'
And that makes him swell up with pride.
But he is not a man — he is a mushroom!

"One day," you said to me, "I saw the sunset forty-four times!"
And a little later you added: "You know — one loves the sunset, when one is so sad..."
"Were you so sad, then?" I asked, "on the day of the forty-four sunsets?"
But the little prince made no reply.

In one of the stars I shall be living. In one of them I shall be laughing. And so it will be as if all the stars were laughing, when you look at the sky at night... You — only you — will have stars that can laugh!

All these stars are silent. You — you alone — will have the stars as no one else has them.

The stars are beautiful, because of a flower that cannot be seen.

"What makes the desert beautiful," said the little prince, "is that somewhere it hides a well..."

I wonder whether the stars are set alight in heaven so that one day each one of us may find his own again...

Men set out on their way in express trains, but they do not know what they are looking for.
Then they rush about, and get excited, and turn round and round...
It is not worth the trouble... But the eyes are blind.
One must look with the heart..

When you've finished your own toilet in the morning, then it is time to attend to the toilet of your planet.

Straight ahead of him, nobody can go very far...

"What are you doing there?" the Little Prince said.
"I am drinking," replied the tippler, with a lugubrious air.
"Why are you drinking?" demanded the little prince.
"So that I may forget," replied the tippler.
"Forget what?" inquired the little prince, who already was sorry for him.
"Forget that I am ashamed," the tippler confessed, hanging his head.
"Ashamed of what?" insisted the little prince, who wanted to help him.
"Ashamed of drinking!"
The tippler brought his speech to an end, and shut himself up in an impregnable silence.

"I thought that I was rich, with a flower that was unique in all the world; and all I had was a common rose.
A common rose, and three volcanoes that come up to my knees — and one of them perhaps extinct forever... That doesn't make me a very great prince..."
And he lay down in the grass and cried.

"I ought not to have listened to her," he confided to me one day.
"One never ought to listen to the flowers.
One should simply look at them and breathe their fragrance.
Mine perfumed all my planet.
But I did not know how to take pleasure in all her grace.
This tale of claws, which disturbed me so much, should only have filled my heart with tenderness and pity."
And he continued his confidences:
"The fact is that I did not know how to understand anything!
I ought to have judged by deeds and not by words.
She cast her fragrance and her radiance over me.
I ought never to have run away from her...
I ought to have guessed all the affection that lay behind her poor little stratagems.
Flowers are so inconsistent!
But I was too young to know how to love her …"

You are like my fox when I first knew him.
He was only a fox like a hundred thousand other foxes.
But I have made him my friend, and now he is unique in all the world.