The little prince and the rose

From the SparkNotes Blog

I soon learned to know this flower better. On the little prince's planet the flowers had always been very simple.

Love, and compassion — which is really just a particularly important form of love — are concepts explored within The Little Prince — easily the most famous novel by the French philosopher and writer Antoine De Saint-Exupery. Like lit lamps in the darkness, it is these brilliant pinpricks of light that exist as counterpoints to the fall from imagination most adults eventually suffer. Most of us know the story of the Little Prince who came to Earth and finds, in a stranded aviator, an odd friend. In the middle of the Second World War, the global consciousness was fraught with division, exploitation, and ever-present fears regarding the future of civilization as it had been known. This is, unfortunately, a cycle of fear which has repeated, and continues to operate in the absence of any sense of unified optimism and society-wide practice of compassion. We live in a world of numbers, and the economics of modern life preclude the exploration of imagination; of laughter and friendship and love; of a future in which a growth into common brotherhood — common love — is possible.