The Little Prince (French Le Petit Prince) is French aviator Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's most famous novel, which he wrote while staying at a hotel in New York, New York..
Ostensibly a children's book, it makes several profound and idealistic points about life and love. In it, he imagined himself to be stranded in the Sahara Desert where he met a young extra-terrestrial Prince. In their conversations, the author revealed his own views about the follies of mankind and the simple wisdom that adults seem to forget when they grow up.
Wikipedia contains spoilers
The Prince lives on an asteroid which has a few volcanoes and a rosebush. He leaves one day to see what the rest of the universe is like, and visits several other asteroids inhabited by adults, each foolish in his own way.
The lamplighter lives on an asteroid which rotates once a minute. Long ago, he was charged with the task of lighting the lamp at night and extinguishing it in the morning. The asteroid revolved then at a reasonable rate, and he had time to rest. But then it sped up, and refusing to disobey the orders, he lights it and extinguishes it once a minute, getting no rest.
The drunkard drinks to forget that he is ashamed of drinking.
The geographer asks him to describe his asteroid. He describes the volcanoes and the rose. "We don't record flowers", answers the geographer. The prince is very hurt. The geographer recommends that he visit the Earth.
On the Earth, he sees a whole row of rosebushes, and is downcast because he thought that his was the only one in the whole universe. He then meets and tames a fox, who explains that his rose is special because it's the one that he loves.
The Prince meets the author and asks him to draw a sheep. Not having the slightest idea how to draw sheep, he draws what he knows, a boa that has just eaten, a drawing which previous viewers mistook for a hat. "No! No!" exclaims the Prince. "I don't want a boa with an elephant inside! I want a sheep..." He tries a few sheep drawings, which the Prince rejects. Finally he draws a box, which he explains has the sheep inside. The Prince, who can see the sheep inside the box just as well as he can see the elephant in the boa, accepts it.
