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The moral lesson of The Little Prince

Summary:

The moral lesson of The Little Prince emphasizes the importance of looking beneath the surface to find the true essence of things. It teaches that love and relationships are what give life meaning, and that one should cherish and nurture these connections, as they are often more significant than material possessions or superficial appearances.

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What is the moral of chapter 4 in The Little Prince?

The moral of chapter four of The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupery is to maintain your childlike wonder when looking at things of the world. The author describes how the Turkish astronomer explains the discovery of the asteroid where the Little Prince came from. The adults did not believe him because of the way he was dressed and how he presented himself. In the rest of the chapter, the author details how differently adults look at things. A child makes a new friend without determining what his father does or other things that adults feel are essential. A child sees the world as a beautiful place without reservation while adults quantify and qualify things based on accepted norms. Children understand the world in a different way than adults do. The author admonishes children to show respect for adults but says,

But certainly, for us who understand life, figures are...

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a matter of indifference. I should have liked to begin this story in the fashion of the fairy-tales. I should have like to say: "Once upon a time there was a little prince who lived on a planet that was scarcely any bigger than himself, and who had need of a sheep . . ."

To those who understand life, that would have given a much greater air of truth to my story.

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What is the moral lesson of The Little Prince?

One of the many moral lessons contained in the story concerns the power of friendship, as we see illustrated by the friendship between the little prince and the fox. On the face of it, they really shouldn't be friends. Throughout history, man and fox have had an uneasy relationship with each other, to say the least. Expressions such as "sly as a fox" indicate just how humans have often regarded these remarkable creatures.

And yet the little prince, unburdened by adult prejudice, is able to strike up a friendship with a fox in the desert, and the fox proceeds to reveal to him some of the most profound truths of human existence. As a result, boy and fox are able to establish a close bond between them that can never be broken.

This is because they realize that friendship, like everything that's truly important in life, comes from the heart, not from one's eyes. To expect the little prince and the fox to be antagonists would be seeing things with the eye, which, as the fox points out to the little prince, doesn't involve seeing things rightly. Their friendship will endure long after more superficial relationships have ended, because it is based on a mutual understanding that comes from the heart.

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Depending on how you view it (stories are all subjective), the lesson from this book can be seen as the only way we can learn in our lives, is through experiencing it ourselves first hand. We cannot rely on others telling us, teaching us, or trying to get a message across. Unless we are there experiencing it ourselves, we will not be able to learn from what is true. Furthermore, the story teaches us the importance of friendship, being invisible, and responsibility. Depending on how the reader views it, this story has many teachings it can offer.

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The moral is that we cannot truly understand unless we search for meaning ourselves. Someone else can tell us about it, but we need to experience it in order to know what it means. The narrator says that what makes the water from the well so good is all the hard work that went into finding the well with water. Relationships, objects, and experiences are rewarding only when a person puts his/her own time and effort into it.
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The main theme of The Little Prince can be summed up, I think, by the Fox's secret, which is "One sees clearly only with the heart. Anything essential is invisible to the eyes." While at first this statement can seem mysterious, we are given many examples of this principle at work in the story. At the beginning of the story, the narrator talks about his drawings number 1 and number 2 -- the first looks like a hat, but, as the second drawing explains, is actually a snake swallowing an elephant. This suggests that appearances can be deceiving -- how "anything essential is invisible to the eye." In the same way, when the narrator is drawing a sheep for the Prince, it is significant that the only satifactory drawing is the one that doesn't represent a sheep at all -- the drawing of the crate. The Little Prince is free in this case to imagine what the sheep inside the crate is like. In this way, we can see that imagination is a kind of knowledge in and of itself, independent of the literal representation of reality.

The Prince's relationship with the Rose is another case in point. The Rose is a vain, demanding, and occasionally untruthful flower, and the Prince goes to great pains to satisfy her needs (he places her under a glass dome to protect her from the wind, is on guard against caterpillars, and worries a great deal about how introducing a sheep to his planet might affect her). However, the Prince's journey shows that he has misunderstood the flower, or his feelings for her. When he comes to Earth and finds the garden of Roses, he is at first distraught because his flower, which he thought was unique, is in fact just one of many flowers. However, what he learns from taming the fox is that the uniqueness of a flower or a person is not based on its appearance, but on one's emotional relationship to it: "You're not at all like my rose...no one has tamed you, and you haven't tamed anyone..." As the fox tells him, "It's the time you spent on your rose that makes your rose so important." In this way, "seeing with the heart" suggests that what is important in life are not external realities, but inner emotional truths.

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The essential truth in The Little Prince arises from what the fox tells the little prince. He says, "It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.” In other words, the essential truth is on the emotional plane rather than the visual plane. Only by understanding one's relationship with others can we see them clearly; if one only uses one's eyes or superficial senses, one won't understand the essence of things. For example, the little prince feels that his one rose is special because he has watered and cared for it by placing it under a glass dome. Though it looks like all other roses, it appears different to the little prince because he feels different about it than he feels about the other roses. The essential truth of the rose arises from his emotional understanding of it, and the essential truth about the world can only be understood by using one's heart rather than simply one's eyes. 

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I'm not sure The Little Prince can be distilled into one grand essential theme; instead, it is a collection of smaller reminders about how to live well and treat people. We meet a geographer who is surrounded by intriguing things but only hears about them from others, a man who counts and buys stars but never even looks up at their magnificence, and a king who has no subjects to rule. The little prince learns many valuable things along the way, which the pilot narrator shares with his readers.

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The greatest lesson in Saint-Exupery's The Little Prince is taught by the fox to the title character:

And now here is my secret, a very simple secret: It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye. (Ch. 21)

The fox's lesson serves to develop Saint-Exupery's two central themes: the importance of reconnecting with one's child self and the importance of finding or maintaining love. According to the fox, love cannot be maintained without this knowledge, knowledge that "[m]en have forgotten." Only children intuitively have the knowledge; therefore, only the child self, the one who is able to see what's invisible, truly has the ability to love.

Based on the narrator's "Drawing Number One" of the "boa constrictor digesting an elephant ... from the outside," we know Saint-Exupery wants to show that children are able to see things adults cannot see: they are able to use faith to see with their imaginations things that are not visible to the eye. This faith gets crushed in the adult world by things that are considered to be of more importance, like math and science. Yet, Saint-Exupery wants to show us that this faith is essential for a fulfilling life, and love cannot be found nor maintained without it. In finding one's faith, one is reconnecting with one's child self. In the story, the little prince reconnected with his child self by realizing how much he loved his rose and coming to understand how responsible he is for her. Likewise, the narrator reconnected with his own child self by returning to do things that were important for him, such as drawing, and through his love for the little prince.

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There is not one moral lesson to be found in "The Little Prince".  Any time you want to find either the theme or the moral of a piece of literature, use this formula:  ______________ (the text) is a book about/story about/play about _____________(abstract noun).  For example, you've probably read "Romeo and Juliet".  Here are three themes/morals from the play:

Romeo and Juliet is a play about love.

Romeo and Juliet is a play about hate.

Romeo and Juliet is a play about haste.

As far as The Little Prince is concerned, you are talking about a semi-autobiographical narrative by a French pilot who has crash landed in the desert and is hallucinating.  If you want to find the morals, take each individual story and decide what it is "about".  The story about the drunk, to name one, is a story about desperation.  You could expand this example to address the general desperation of mankind.  Each story is the same in that universal fashion.  Mostly, these stories are about how each individual is wrapped up totally in himself.

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