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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.

Attributed to Saint-Exupéry; a later paraphrase of his Citadelle

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The story behind the card

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (1900–1944), the French pilot and author of The Little Prince, never wrote this sentence. In Citadelle, an unfinished book published in 1948, four years after he disappeared on a wartime flight, he makes a related point: a ship comes into being less through weaving sails and forging nails than through giving people a love of the sea. Later writers compressed that thought into this tidy maxim and put his name to it.

Türkçe oku
Bir gemi yapmak istiyorsan insanları odun toplamaya çağırıp onlara görev ve iş dağıtma; onlara denizin uçsuz bucaksız enginliğini özlemeyi öğret.
Saint-Exupéry'ye atfedilir; Citadelle'den sonradan yapılmış bir uyarlama

Küçük Prens'in yazarı Fransız pilot Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (1900–1944) bu cümleyi hiç yazmadı. 1944'te bir savaş uçuşunda kaybolmasından dört yıl sonra, 1948'de yayımlanan yarım kalmış kitabı Citadelle'de buna yakın bir düşünce vardır: Bir gemiyi var eden, yelken bezi dokumaktan, çivi dövmekten çok, insanlara deniz sevgisi aşılamaktır. Sonraki yazarlar bu düşünceyi derli toplu bir söze dönüştürüp altına onun adını koydu.

Sources and further reading

Background reading: Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
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