Looking out over the ocean is much like looking out into the stars, triggering that same sense of immensity and, among some at least, the drive to explore. The quote above is a much abbreviated paraphrase but does capture the spirit of the original (you’ll find a translation of the original at the end of this post).
So I did some digging and turned up a passage in Saint-Exupéry’s posthumously published Citadelle (1948) that comes close.
I hadn’t either, which bothered me because I am a huge fan of the man’s work. I had to track down the quote because the last time it appeared in these pages, a reader wrote to tell me he had never found it in Saint-Exupéry. Image: Antoine de Saint-Exupery, whose work inspired, among many other things, my own decision to take up flying. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.” “If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work and give orders. I think the Saint-Exupéry quote captures what it takes to contemplate far voyaging: I like nautical metaphors as applied to the stars, my favorite being the words attributed to Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, French writer/aviator and author of poetic works about flight like Wind, Sand and Stars (1939), and a work familiar to most American students of French, Vol de nuit, published in English as Night Flight (1931).