Grown-ups are like that… When you tell them that you have made a new friend, they never ask you any questions about essential matters. They never say to you, “What does his voice sound like? What games does he love best? Does he collect butterflies?” Instead, they demand: “How old is he? How many brothers has he? How much does he weigh? How much money does his father make?”Only from these figures do they think they have learned anything about him.
If you were to say to the grown-ups: “I saw a beautiful house made of rosy brick, with geraniums in the windows and doves on the roof,” they would not be able to get any idea of that house at all.
You would have to say to them: “I saw a house that cost $ 20,000.” Then they would exclaim: “Oh, what a pretty house that is!”
“The men where you live,” said the little prince, “raise five thousand roses in the same garden and they do not find in it what they are looking for.”
“They do not find it,” I replied.
“And yet what they are looking for could be found in one single rose, or in a little water.”
“Yes, that is true,” I said.
And the little prince added: “But the eyes are blind. One must look with the heart…”
……
“I am looking for friends. What does that mean, ‘tame’?”
“It is an act too often neglected,” said the fox. It means to establish ties.”
“‘To establish ties’?”
“Just that,” said the fox. “To me, you are still nothing more than a little boy who is just like a hundred thousand other little boys. And I have no need of you. And you, on your part, have no need of me. To you, I am nothing more than a fox like a hundred thousand other foxes. But if you tame me, then we shall need each other. To me, you will be unique in all the world. To you, I shall be unique in all the world…”
“My life is very monotonous,” the fox said. “I hunt chickens; men hunt me. All the chickens are just alike, and all the men are just alike. And, in consequence, I am a little bored. But if you tame me, it will be as if the sun came to shine on my life . I shall know the sound of a step that will be different from all the others. Other steps send me hurrying back underneath the ground. Yours will call me, like music, out of my burrow. And then look: you see the grain-fields down yonder? I do not eat bread. Wheat is of no use to me. The wheat fields have nothing to say to me. And that is sad. But you have hair that is the colour of gold. Think how wonderful that will be when you have tamed me! The grain, which is also golden, will bring me back the thought of you. And I shall love to listen to the wind in the wheat…” The fox gazed at the little prince, for a long time. “Please, tame me!” he said.
“I want to, very much,” the little prince replied. “But I have not much time. I have friends to discover, and a great many things to understand.”
“One only understands the things that one tames,” said the fox. “Men have no more time to understand anything. They buy things all ready made at the shops. But there is no shop anywhere where one can buy friendship, and so men have no friends any more. If you want a friend, tame me…”
“What must I do, to tame you?” asked the little prince.
“You must be very patient,” replied the fox. “First you will sit down at a little distance from me, like that, in the grass. I shall look at you out of the corner of my eye, and you will say nothing. Words are the source of misunderstandings. But you will sit a little closer to me, every day…”
The next day the little prince came back.
“It would have been better to come back at the same hour,” said the fox. “If, for example, you come at four o’clock in the afternoon, then at three o’clock I shall begin to be happy. I shall feel happier and happier as the hour advances. At four o’clock, I shall already be worrying and jumping about. I shall show you how happy I am! But if you come at just any time, I shall never know at what hour my heart is to be ready to greet you… One must observe the proper rites…”
“What is a rite?” asked the little prince.
“Those also are actions too often neglected,” said the fox. “They are what make one day different from other days, one hour from other hours. There is a rite, for example, among my hunters. Every Thursday they dance with the village girls. So Thursday is a wonderful day for me! I can take a walk as far as the vineyards. But if the hunters danced at just any time, every day would be like every other day, and I should never have any vacation at all.”
So the little prince tamed the fox. And when the hour of his departure drew near…
“Ah,” said the fox, “I shall cry.”
“It is your own fault,” said the little prince. “I never wished you any sort of harm; but you wanted me to tame you…”
“Yes, that is so,” said the fox.
“But now you are going to cry!” said the little prince.
“Yes, that is so,” said the fox.
“Then it has done you no good at all!”
“It has done me good,” said the fox, “because of the color of the wheat fields.” And then he added: “Go and look again at the roses. You will understand now that yours is unique in all the world. Then come back to say goodbye to me, and I will make you a present of a secret.”
The little prince went away, to look again at the roses. “You are not at all like my rose,” he said. “As yet you are nothing. No one has tamed you, and you have tamed no one. 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.” And the roses were very much embarrassed. “You are beautiful, but you are empty,” he went on. “One could not die for you. To be sure, an ordinary passerby would think that my rose looked just like you, the rose that belongs to me. But in herself alone she is more important than all the hundreds of you other roses: because it is she that I have watered; because it is she that I have put under the glass globe; because it is she that I have sheltered behind the screen; because it is for her that I have killed the caterpillars (except the two or three that we saved to become butterflies); because it is she that I have listened to, when she grumbled, or boasted, or even sometimes when she said nothing. Because she is my rose.
And he went back to meet the fox. “Goodbye,” he said.
“Goodbye,” said the fox. “And now here is my secret, a very simple secret: It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.”
“What is essential is invisible to the eye,” the little prince repeated, so that he would be sure to remember.
“It is the time you have wasted for your rose that makes your rose so important.”
“It is the time I have wasted for my rose…” said the little prince, so that he would be sure to remember.
“Men have forgotten this truth,” said the fox. “But you must not forget it. You become responsible, forever, for what you have tamed. You are responsible for your rose…”
“I am responsible for my rose,” the little prince repeated, so that he would be sure to remember.
Kurb on sõpra unustada. Igaühel pole sõpra olnudki.
“It is a good thing to have had a friend, even if one is about to die. I, for instance, am very glad to have had a fox as a friend…”
“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.
“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 strategems.
“Then you shall judge yourself,” the king answered. “that is the most difficult thing of all. It is much more difficult to judge oneself than to judge others. If you succeed in judging yourself rightly, then you are indeed a man of true wisdom.”
Lampe tuleb hoolega hoida – üksainus tuulehoog võib nad kustutada…
It is such a secret place, the land of tears.
“Dear little man,” I said to him, “you are afraid…” He was afraid, there was no doubt about that. But he laughed lightly.
“I shall be much more afraid this evening…”
Once again I felt myself frozen by the sense of something irreparable. And I knew that I could not bear the thought of never hearing that laughter any more. For me, it was like a spring of fresh water in the desert.
“Little man,” I said, “I want to hear you laugh again.” But he said to me: “Tonight, it will be a year… my star, then, can be found right above the place where I came to the Earth, a year ago…”
“Little man,” I said, “tell me that it is only a bad dream, this affair of the snake, and the meeting-place, and the star…” But he did not answer my plea.
He said to me, instead: “The thing that is important is the thing that is not seen…”
“And at night you will look up at the stars. Where I live everything is so small that I cannot show you where my star is to be found. It is better, like that. My star will just be one of the stars, for you. And so you will love to watch all the stars in the heavens… they will all be your friends. And, besides, I am going to make you a present…” He laughed again.
“Ah, little prince, dear little prince! I love to hear that laughter!”
“That is my present. Just that. It will be as it was when we drank the water…”
“What are you trying to say?”
“All men have the stars,” he answered, “but they are not the same things for different people. For some, who are travelers, the stars are guides. For others they are no more than little lights in the sky. For others, who are scholars, they are problems. For my businessman they were wealth. But all these stars are silent. You, you alone, will have the stars as no one else has them”
“What are you trying to say?”
“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!”
And he laughed again. “And when your sorrow is comforted (time soothes all sorrows) you will be content that you have known me. You will always be my friend. You will want to laugh with me. And you will sometimes open your window, so, for that pleasure… and your friends will be properly astonished to see you laughing as you look up at the sky! Then you will say to them, ‘Yes, the stars always make me laugh!’ And they will think you are crazy. It will be a very shabby trick that I shall have played on you…”
And he laughed again. “It will be as if, in place of the stars, I had given you a great number of little bells that knew how to laugh…”
“Good morning,” said the little prince.
“Good morning,” said the merchant.
This was a merchant who sold pills that had been invented to quench thirst. You need only swallow one pill a week, and you would feel no need of anything to drink.
“Why are you selling those?” asked the little prince.
“Because they save a tremendous amount of time,” said the merchant. “Computations have been made by experts. With these pills, you save fifty-three minutes in every week.”
“And what do I do with those fifty-three minutes?”
“Anything you like…”
“As for me,” said the little prince to himself, “if I had fifty-three minutes to spend as I liked, I should walk at my leisure toward a spring of fresh water.”
“The Little Prince”
Antoine De Saint-Exupery
Mõni inimene teeb maailma paremaks vaid oma kohalolekuga
Hea iseloomu valgus ületab päikese valguse ja selle sära. Kes selle saavutab, on nagu kalliskivi inimeste seas.
Inimene ei või saada suuremat kingitust kui see, et ta rõõmustab teise südant.
“Puhh! sosistas Notsu.
“Mis on?” küsis Puhh.
“Ei midagi” vastas Notsu ja võttis Puhhil käpast kinni, “lihtsalt kontrollisin, et oled olemas!”
Tea, et Päike on alati olemas,
isegi siis kui ei paista.
Ning, et iga kord ei tähenda
tuuline ilm veel tormi.
Vahest tekitab tuuline ilm
vaid pilvisust päikseses taevas.
Tuulevaiksed ilmad aga
on haruldased ja igavad.
Et olukorras selgust saada,
milline on hetkel ilm
tuleb sul lihtsal korraks
peatuda ja kuulatada…
Oska olla, imet tabada
Õnne leida, elada vabana
Oska võidelda, võita ning ihata
Tõde leida, pettusi vihata
Olla inimene, see tähendab olla vastutav.
Antoine De Saint-Exupery
Midagi pole iseenesest ei hea ega halb, mõtlemine teeb asja kas heaks või halvaks.
Shakespeare
Inimesed on just nii õnnelikud nagu nad on nõuks võtnud olla.
Abe Lincoln
Igaüks siin maailmas otsib õnne – ja on olemas üks kindel viis selle leidmiseks. See on – oma mõtete valitsemine. Õnn ei olene välistest vaid sisemistest teguritest.
Mitte see, mida te omate, kes te olete, kus te olete või mida teete, ei tee teid õnnelikuks või õnnetuks. Määrava tähtsusega on see, mida te sellest mõtlete. Kaks inimest võivad olla samas kohas ja samas tegevuses, mõlemal võib olla ühepalju raha ning ühesugune positsioon – ja siiski võib üks olla õnnetu, teine õnnelik.
Dale Carnegie