In The Empire Strikes Back, the diminutive Jedi Master Yoda instructs Luke Skywalker to use the Force to lift his crashed X-Wing out of a swamp. Luke gives up after his unsuccessful first attempt, complaining, "I can't. It's too big." Yoda's reply points out the underlying flaw in Luke's way of looking at things: "Size matters not."
This is not the first time Luke makes a hasty judgment based on the size of a thing. In A New Hope, the diminutive droid R2-D2 tricks Luke into removing his restraining bolt so he can escape from the Lars homestead. Luke foolishly complies, saying, "I guess you're too small to run away on me if I take this off." Deceived by R2's unimpressive appearance, Luke underestimates his abilities – only to learn, shortly thereafter, that R2 was not too small to run away.
Luke's way of thinking about R2-D2 mirrors the Empire's thinking about the Rebellion. At the Rebel briefing before the attack on the Death Star, General Dodonna explains, "The Empire doesn't consider a small, one-man fighter to be any threat, or they'd have a tighter defense." The Death Star is impressively big – "Look at the size of that thing!" says Wedge Antilles as the X-Wings approach it – but it is destroyed by a small fighter targeting a small, seemingly insignificant weakness.
When Luke complains that his X-Wing is "too big" to lift out of the swamp, Yoda chides, "Look at me. Judge me by my size, do you? Hmm? And well you should not, for my ally is the Force." Yoda – who is, physically, much smaller than Luke – proceeds to make his point by using the Force to lift the X-Wing out of the swamp himself.
Luke should know better than to complain that he cannot lift the X-Wing because of its size; after all, the Force helped him to destroy the massive Death Star when piloting the same "small" X-Wing. The Force often uses small things to confound the expectations of those who judge by size.
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Characters: Luke Skywalker / R2-D2 / Yoda
Films: Episode IV: A New Hope / Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back
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Concepts: power and weakness / sight and blindness / size
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