Terre des hommes

What Hacker News says

1. jacobolusMar 2015
   Your quotation has 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 I remember correctly the paragraphs are arranged a bit differently in the French original, but anyway...):

   It is as if there were a natural law which ordained that to achieve this end, to refine the curve of a piece of furniture, or a ship’s keel, or the fuselage of an airplane, until gradually it partakes of the elementary purity of the curve of a human breast or shoulder, there must be the experimentation of several generations of craftsmen. In anything at all, perfection is finally attained not when there is no longer anything to add, but when there is no longer anything to take away, when a body has been stripped down to its nakedness.

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2. jacobolusSep 2010
   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 and in English: http://books.google.com/books?id=Ep-h7MuxLiIC&lpg=PP1...]

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3. jacobolusJul 2010
   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 hackers especially the chapter containing that quotation (it’s somewhere near the beginning). St. Ex. provides one of the most insightful/“true ringing” defenses of technology I’ve ever read.

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4. perilunarAug 2025
   “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

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5. kpsFeb 2024
   “Have you looked at a modern airplane? Have you followed from year to year the evolution of its lines? Have you ever thought, not only about the airplane but about whatever man builds, that all of man's industrial efforts, all his computations and calculations, all the nights spent over working draughts and blueprints, invariably culminate in the production of a thing whose sole and guiding principle is the ultimate principle of simplicity?

   “It is as if there were a natural law which ordained that to achieve this end, to refine the curve of a piece of furniture, or a ship's keel, or the fuselage of an airplane, until gradually it partakes of the elementary purity of the curve of a human breast or shoulder, there must be the 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

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6. svilen_dobrevOct 2023
   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 against some obstacle. And for that he needs a tool. ... So the airplane, the tool of air transport, pulls the human into all them old problems.

   ...

   part iV

   ... For centuries our roads have been deceiving us.. avoiding badlands, rocks, sands, only going from one spring to another.... Airplane gave us the straight line. .. and we see the deep essential bottom, rocks in the base.. ... "

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