There is no truth. There is only perception.

The line expresses a radically subjectivist or relativist stance: what people call “truth” is not an objective, stable reality but a product of individual viewpoint, temperament, and circumstance. Read this way, it aligns with a modern skepticism about certainty and with the idea that narratives—personal, social, or artistic—shape what is taken to be real. In a literary context, it can be used to frame how characters (and readers) construct meaning from partial information, bias, and desire. However, despite its frequent attribution to Flaubert, the phrasing sounds more like a later, aphoristic formulation than something securely traceable to his known works or correspondence.