I’ve used this line of Saint-Exupéry’s in a work of art in the past. It was an enormous over-sized version of The Little Prince that I created for a museum exhibition, and it included also an audio recording created by my friend, Karen Cellini.

One of Saint-Exupéry’s original watercolors for The Little Prince

“Man is first animated by invisible solicitations.”

Maria Popova writes here about what the Sahara Desert can teach us about the meaning of life in Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s book, Letter to a Hostage, “a poignant meditation on the atrocities the World War was inflicting at the scale of the human soul, exploring questions of identity, belonging, empathy, and the life of the spirit amidst death.”

Of the Sahara, Saint-Exupéry writes:

There, one perpetually bathes in the conditions for sheer boredom. And yet invisible divinities build up a net of directions, slopes and signs, a secret and living frame. No more uniformity. Everything takes up a definite position. Even one silence is unlike another silence.