There is No Truth

There is no truth; there is only perception of the truth. But that's not really true because there are irrefutable truths, and scientific experts know what they are. They would have told you that the earth is flat, it's one of nine planets, and it's the center of the universe, a universe that is static, neither expanding or contracting. Oh, and about the continents, they don't move. Feeling a little sick? Got a touch of cholera? It's that bad toxic air that you were breathing. There's no such thing as little, tiny microscopic bug-like thingies that invade your body, make you very sick, and then you die.

See! There are truths that can't be disputed. Just ask the scientists who gave us the above truths years ago. Oh, wait a minute! You can't; they're all dead. Shoot! That's not true. Some of the scientists who told us that Pluto was the ninth planet might still be around. But they're really old by now. Darn it! That's probably not true either. Sixty is the new forty, seventy is the new fifty, so they could still be here sharing irrefutable truths.

Now that we know there are definite, undeniable truths, who was it who said "There is no truth; there is only perception of the truth" and what did the author mean by that obviously untrue statement? I asked Google and Google sent me to Wikipedia and Wikipedia pointed to Gustave Flaubert, a French writer who died in 1880 at age fifty-eight. But back then fifty-eight was the old seventy-eight so it was time for him to kick the bucket anyway...or was it? Had it not been for his wayward, nonselective, indiscriminate wally dinger, he could have lived a whole lot longer...or maybe not.