The Little Prince love quotes: the rose, the fox, and the lines people put in wedding vows

Two of the most-quoted love passages in twentieth-century literature belong to a flower who cannot apologise and an animal who wants a standing appointment. Neither exchange is romantic, which has never slowed anybody down.

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's novella was published in New York by Reynal & Hitchcock in April 1943, in English and French at once; Gallimard only brought it out in France in 1945, after the liberation, the author's work having been banned under Vichy. It has since sold around 140 million copies and, as of November 2024, existed in 600 languages and dialects — second only to the Bible. Which means that when someone reads a line of it at a wedding, they are almost certainly reading a translation, and the translation matters more than most people realise.

The rose (chapters 8 and 9)

The rose arrives on the prince's planet, is vain, coughs theatrically, demands a screen and a glass globe, and drives him away. Her farewell is the book's quietest correction of the record: she tells him she does love him, and that it was her own fault he never knew it. She then asks him to put the globe away, because she has decided she would rather face the night air than be managed.

Saint-Exupéry's wife, Consuelo, the Salvadoran writer he married in 1931, is generally taken as the model. The prince's own verdict on the whole affair is the line that does the most work in vows:

"I ought to have judged her by her deeds and not by her words."

It is not a compliment to the rose. It is an admission that he read her badly.

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The fox (chapter 21)

The fox asks to be tamed, and the French verb is apprivoiser. English has no clean equivalent: "tame" suggests a power relationship that is not in the original, which the fox defines as créer des liens — creating ties. The fox then explains that taming requires patience, ritual and an agreed hour, and that the cost of it is grief when the other party leaves.

Three lines from that chapter account for most of the book's presence in wedding ceremonies:

• "It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye." — Katherine Woods, 1943. Richard Howard's 2000 translation has "One sees clearly only with the heart. Anything essential is invisible to the eyes."
• "It is the time you have wasted for your rose that makes your rose so important." — Woods again. Howard gives "the time you spent on your rose", which is more natural English and loses the idea of sacrifice built into perdu.
• "You become responsible, forever, for what you have tamed." — the fox's closing condition, and the one that reads least like sentiment and most like a contract.

Saint-Exupéry is said to have rewritten the first of these roughly fifteen times. The fox is usually traced to Silvia Hamilton Reinhardt, a close friend during his New York years, who is credited with suggesting the phrasing.

Which translation to use

Woods was first, in 1943, and her rhythms are the ones most people half-remember. Howard, in 2000, modernised the register and smoothed the syntax. T.V.F. Cuffe, Irene Testot-Ferry, Alan Wakeman, Michael Morpurgo and Gregory Norminton have all had a go since, and the differences are not cosmetic — the shift from "wasted for" to "spent on" changes what the sentence is arguing.

If you are reading it aloud on the day, read both versions first and pick by ear. The French is public domain in most of the world; the English translations are not, and they are not interchangeable.

For the record: the book is still under copyright in the United States until 2039. In France, the term was extended by thirty years because Saint-Exupéry was declared mort pour la France after his aircraft disappeared over the Mediterranean in July 1944.

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