Terre des hommes
by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry · first published 1936
7mentions
1recommended by
5HN commenters
2010–2025first – last mentioned
20% recommend80% neutral
A lyrical account of the author’s time as a pilot flying the dangerous mail routes across the Sahara and the Andes. Many incidents are recounted, including the time he crashed his plane in the Sahara and, along with his navigator, is forced to walk for days without food or water before finding safety.
Affiliate links. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.
I really recommend the whole chapter this quotation comes from, and for that matter the whole book (Wind, Sand, and Stars, or in the original French, Terre des hommes). It’s a fantastically optimistic take on the relation of humans to technology (the specific example is airplanes, but the argument is quite general). [Here’s the immediate context in French: http://wikilivres.info/wiki/Terre_des_hommes/III…
on “This is engineering: Army Jeep torn apart and reassembled in 4 minutes” ↗…distorted the original a bit. (Well, of course the original is in French, but Lewis Galantière’s translation into English is also lovely.) It’s from chapter 3 of the book Wind, Sand & Stars (in French, Terre des hommes). Here’s the full text of that chapter, which I highly recommend to everyone: https://gist.github.com/anonymous/cd950f8ac6d58349e9e6 And here’s the paragraph surrounding the quotation in question (if…
on “Stephen King's “Everything You Need to Know About Writing Successfully”” ↗The classic line from St. Exupéry’s Wind, Sand, and Stars (in French, Terre des hommes) is “Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to remove.” For any who have not read that book, I highly highly recommend the whole thing, and for…
on “The Complexity of 'Simplicity'” ↗It's kind of funny, looking back at that age, how unreliable machinery was, how famous aviators disappeared all the time. Antoine de Saint-Exupery, who wrote Terre des Hommes and The Little Prince, was another who went away.
on “Amelia Earhart Plane Fragment Identified?” ↗as Exupery said in "Planet of people" (Terre des hommes, 1939), in my rough understanding - "technology opens up views we did not want to see": (excuse my quoting/mistranslation from yet another language): " part I ... Man find himself when he tries himself…
on “The Web Is for User Agency” ↗…experimentation of several generations of craftsmen. It seems that perfection is attained not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing more to remove.” — Antoine de Saint Exupéry, Terre des Hommes
on “A 2024 plea for lean software” ↗“Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.” — Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Terre des hommes, 1939
on “Do the simplest thing that could possibly work” ↗