Science & Tech Quote by Gustave Flaubert

Flaubert is doing that most Flaubertian of maneuvers: praising imagination by stripping it of its alibis. “All one’s inventions are true” doesn’t mean fiction is secretly memoir; it means fabrication is a diagnostic tool. You can’t invent outside your own obsessions, blind spots, and hungers. A made-up scene still bears the fingerprints of the maker, and Flaubert - who treated style like a moral problem - is insisting that art’s “truth” is less about factual accuracy than about psychological and social precision.

Then comes the provocation: “Poetry is as exact a science as geometry.” He’s poking at the comforting myth of the inspired scribbler. In Flaubert’s world, the lyric impulse is not a permission slip to be vague. It’s labor, measurement, ruthless selection: le mot juste as a kind of theorem. Geometry becomes the metaphor not because poems “prove” things, but because they’re built: constraints, balance, internal logic, edges you can test by reading aloud and feeling where the structure fails.

The context is mid-19th-century realism, when the novel is trying to earn cultural authority by competing with science and journalism. Flaubert’s twist is to claim the authority of science without surrendering art’s freedom. He isn’t arguing that poetry is cold; he’s arguing it’s accountable. The subtext is a warning to writers and readers alike: if a work feels true, it’s because it’s engineered to be, and that engineering carries responsibility.