What does this quote mean in The Little Prince: "It is only in the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye."
This quote from the fox encapsulates a theme that runs throughout The Little Prince and is explored in the story from different angles. In the opening of the story, seeing from the heart allows the Little Prince to understand that the drawing the aviator shows him is not a hat, but an elephant that has been swallowed by a boa constrictor. He can perceive this largely invisible reality because, like the aviator, he has a child's simplicity and clarity of heart and vision.
The Little Prince has had only limited experience with life when he arrives on Earth, because the asteroid on which he has lived most of his life is very small, and most of his visits to other planetary bodies have been fleeting. On Earth, he encounters for the first time the reality that his rose is not unique, as she has told him she is. He sees...
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the wall of a house covered in roses that look, on the outside, identical to his own rose. This is a deeply shattering experience for him, until the fox advises him that the outward appearance of the rose does not matter as much as what is within: what the heart can see, not what the eyes see. The prince's rose matters to him because of the loving (and sometimes vexing) relationship they have developed. That is what matters.
Finally, as the Little Prince makes the decision to allow the snake to bite him so he can die and return, hopefully, to his own asteroid, the fox says he will grieve the prince's departure. This seems masochistic to the Little Prince, who doesn't understand why the fox would do this. At this point, the fox states,
It is only in the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.
In other words, emotions don't have to make logical sense. The fox will grieve the prince because he has established an emotional bond with him that causes him to value his company. That bond is invisible but no less real for being invisible, and breaking it will cause the fox pain.
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The quote is talking about the inability of most adults to be able to believe in things that they cannot see with their eyes. By the time we have reached adulthood, we have lost that child-like quality that allows us to imagine what can't be proven. As adults, we see only the outward appearances of people and things. We no longer see a person's inner beauty, for example, or appreciate the beautiful things in nature. As adults, we have become cynical and have lost our child-like innocence. We concern ourselves with the daily, "serious" subjects of life, such as paying bills, getting a better job, or buying a bigger, better car. The love we feel for other people in our lives is not something we can see, but we know that it's there because we feel it within our hearts. The differences between our childhood and our adulthood are vast. As a child, we use our imaginations and feel wonder at such small things that most of us as adults don't see anymore. The child can see the magic in the world and believe in it. Unfortunately, most of us lose that by the time we have become adults.
In The Little Prince, what is the significance of "Anything essential is invisible to the eyes"?
The fox's secret, that "anything essential is invisible to the eyes," serves as a sort of "thesis" for the story. What this means, basically, is that seeing the "truth" of things requires insight and empathy, and that emotional truth is more essential that factual truth. St Exupery neatly demonstrates the problem through the pilot's drawings 1 and 2. Drawing No 1. really does look like a hat, and our failure to interpret it correctly puts us in the same place as the other "adults" the pilot dismisses. He finally spells it out for us, with drawing no. 2: what looks like a hat is really a snake swallowing an elephant. As readers, we are put in an uncomfortable position: we sympathize with the Pilot over the adults' lack of insight, but we (secretly) also feel a bit guilty ourselves, since we thought it was a hat too!
The Prince's problem -- how to understand the Rose -- is another case where the outside (how the Rose acts) is not the same as how the Rose really feels. The Prince learns that his ability to understand the Rose is connected to his experience of her. Although the Rose has told the Prince that she is unique in all the universe, on Earth he finds thousands of flowers that look just like her. Judging from appearances, the Rose would seem to be a liar, but what the Prince realizes is that none of them are her, because of the time he has spent with his Rose. In this way we can see that the truth of things is based on shared experience rather than what we see.