7 Life Lessons from the World’s Greatest Philosophy Book
When Antoine de Saint-Exupéry set out on his journey with the little prince, he did not know the impact that this small book would have on the world of children and adults alike.
Above anything else, The Little Prince is a philosophy book — one that delves into the brilliant abilities of children to imagine and comprehend things beyond the patience and aptitude of the adults around them.
The book tells the story of a desert-stranded pilot’s friendship with a little prince boy, who shares with the distressed man the stories about his home and the planets and people he has encountered. He has met vain and proud flowers, strange adults with strange lives, and a particularly insightful fox, and these experiences have shaped his philosophies about the world he lives in.
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry encourages our main character, and by extent the reader, to learn from these tales that the little prince and the aviator tell. There are 27 short chapters in the book, and many takeaways to find, but I have selected the seven lessons I find most central and personally important. They are presented in no particular order.
1 : Judge yourself first, not others
In his encounter with a lonely King, the little prince learns a valuable lesson. The King demands obedience of his subjects, but seeing as he is a sensible ruler, he only gives reasonable orders. After all, he tells the young boy, you ought not to expect from another person what you will not or cannot do yourself. If so, it is the fault of your own and not of the other person not to meet the standards you have set.
Even the main character in our little book, the aviator, goes from looking at the little prince as an annoying child who does not understand the gravity of his situation to caring for him as a close friend whose concerns and feelings are just as valid as his own. In getting to know the boy, the flyer finds himself at odds with his initial judgments of the little prince and comes to appreciate that which he first disparaged.
Indeed, it seems that the flaws we often ascribe to others can be found just as well in ourselves. We tend to expect — and demand — only good from our peers, but it is often ourselves that we should look into before we judge others.
2 : Focus on the underlying issue
On his journey across planets, the little prince stumbles upon a man drinking his sorrows away. The man explains that he keeps drinking because he wants to forget the fact that he is ashamed of drinking. Thus, he keeps watering his sources of distress even when he is trying to wash them away.
On another planet, the prince meets a lamplighter. Because of the increasing rotation of his own little planet, the lamplighter must now lit and relit his lamp every minute, at the cost of getting much-needed rest. Even though this is done out of the good of his own heart, and for the benefit of others, he is just as unproductive as the drinking man. Instead of adjusting his routine and securing his need for sleep and rest, the lamplighter keeps pursuing his increasingly demanding task and ultimately fails to fix the underlying issue at hand.
If we know the reason behind our harmful and unconstructive behaviors and target the underlying issue at hand, we can learn to, as Stephen Covey puts it, “hack at the roots” instead of “hacking at the leaves.” This is, admittedly, a difficult feat to achieve, especially if we suffer from an addiction to such harmful behaviors; but it is an important thing to keep in mind, no matter how we choose to tackle the problem.
3 : Seek substance, not superficiality
In today’s consumeristic and materialistic culture, some of the prince’s tales have become more important than ever. When he arrives on earth, the prince meets a fox who dislikes humans for their shallowness. On becoming close friends, the red-furred animal gives the boy some clever advice: “You only see clearly with your heart. The most important things are invisible to the eyes. It is the time you spent on your rose that makes your rose so important.”
Indeed, in a world where there are so many roses, and so many things, it is our genuine bonds to a select few things that are most special. It is the bond that the little prince shares with his rose that makes her different from the thousands of identical flowers in the desert garden, and it is the fox’ bond with the boy that makes their goodbye so saddening. It is these connections that we ought to nurture, these bonds that can never be substituted by surface-level relationships or manufactured commodities.
When the pilot first meets the little prince, the stars overhead are just stars. After their farewells, the stars come to mean more; because somewhere, on one of those golden lights, lives a boy with a twinkling laugh. To the man, there are millions of stars — but only one that matters.
4 : Do things that have purpose
Upon finding a businessman hard at work, the little prince learns perhaps one of the most central lessons in the book. The man in question, who is so engrossed in his work that he finds any and all distractions agitating, is counting the stars in the sky with one goal in mind: to own these stars and become rich so that he can buy even more stars.
Many of the grown-ups we encounter, including the aforementioned star billionaire, claim to be working on these such “serious matters” because they are hard-working, “busy” people. But it is shallow work that lacks real purpose.
Instead we ought to work hard for something that is truly, deeply important to ourselves and others; something that holds purpose and significance to the heart. Otherwise, we end up doing meaningless work for the sake of just working. Much like the businessman, we become rich on stars, but deprived of meaning. Or worse yet, we become the indifferent passengers on the train by the end of the book, heading towards an unknown destination on a journey we do not care about.
But sometimes the most meaningful work is the most difficult work. There is more to gain and more to lose, and there are internal expectations and external pressures that keep us down. But even so, we must prevail.
When our narrator the aviator is at risk of dying from thirst, he despairs at the endlessness of the hot, sandy desert around him. His companion, though, decides to look for water, claiming it to be important because it is “good for the heart.” In spite of the pilot’s complaints about the implausibility of finding such a remedy among the sand dunes, the prince admires the bare landscape around him and notes, “What makes the desert more beautiful, is that it’s hiding a well somewhere.”
It is then, the end goal — the purpose in mind — that makes the endless, sometimes even tedious, journey worth it. Follow your heart, and you will find a purpose. Follow this purpose, and you will find meaning.
5 : Value important over urgent work
Throughout his journey, the little prince underlines how much he values routines and rituals — that is, the continued and persistent effort towards an important end goal. Each day, he cleans his volcanoes and waters his flower. On earth, he dedicates several hours for months to secure the trust and friendship of the fox, a friend that would come to be one of his dearest.
It is clear that the little prince values patient and consistent work over urgent and hasty work. But only the kind that is truly important. The prince admires the lamplighter for the goodness of his heart, but wonders upon the revelation that he never rests, that “strangely enough, a person can be both faithful to their job and lazy at the same time.” Whereas the lamplighter operates on urgency only, the prince takes things slowly with the fox, the rose, and the aviator — all of which end up being the closest, most meaningful connections he has.
Truly, it is the consistent time and effort made into routines that mark his success. Every day, he pulls up baobab sprouts from the soil on his planet to prevent them from producing damaging and irremovable trees. By eliminating these small problems that could well become larger ones in the long run, he proves his ability to act on what is important instead of what is urgent, so that he never has to resort to what is already too late.
6 : Broaden your perspective
Whereas the little prince continuously asks questions to learn, the grown-ups he meets always assume superiority of knowledge. The businessman assumes his job has purpose, when in reality it does not; the King believes his authority to be absolute, when the only thing he truly masters is his own words; and the self-centered showoff thinks himself the “smartest, handsomest, wealthiest, and cleverest” man there is when he stands alone on his part of the world and only listens to praise.
Even the lonely flower in the desert assumes there only to be seven people inhabiting the earth. Rooted as she has been to the same spot since her birth, unable to move and explore the world around her, she has founded her own perspective on a much-limited observation.
The narrator writes about how adults on earth do this too. “Grown-ups love numbers,” he writes, and it is through this view that they evaluate the world, missing out on the beauty and flavor of the things around them that only words and imagination can capture.
The aviator himself acknowledges his own shortcomings at the end of the story. He has been unreasonable and unfair towards the boy’s intense wish to learn. The little prince, “who once he had asked a question, never let the matter drop”, is curious and never roots himself to one spot. He leaves each planet and place with new insights, while the adults and flowers around him stay stranded in their lonely spots, isolated from the world and fully convinced of their own correctness.
So when he tries to talk to the wind howling through an empty mountain range and receives only echoes in response, he is puzzled. Because no-one that seeks to learn and grow wants to hear their own voice loudest.
7 : Be an explorer
Though the little prince is not human, he does something very human indeed. He explores. As he travels from one planet to the next, knowing only the purpose that lies within his heart, he comes across individuals and landscapes new and old and learns along the way.
A lone geographer tells the prince that he only wants to collect information about things that are stable and not ephemeral. He, who has been confined to his desk for years too many, knows nothing about exploration and growth. He knows only about mountains and rivers and other things that never change and never need change, but even these he never goes to see himself. After all, he claims himself that he is a geographer, “not an explorer.”
But the little prince thinks differently. He values imagination and learning — fields of life that people seem to abandon as soon as they grow old enough to settle. Indeed, the little prince knows that it is only through exploration of his surroundings and his mind, of people, places, and himself, that he can reach true happiness.
The Little Prince is filled to the brim with tales and lessons for young and old. There is no shortage of takeaways one can pluck off from this small little book, but these aforementioned lessons on self-reflection, meaning, and growth are ones I find most central to the story, and the most important ones to internalize.
In the end, when the little prince sheds his skin and leaves to reunite with his rose, and the pilot flies back to France, both return imbued with new wisdoms in their hearts. So do we.
And that makes all the difference.
