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About this quote

What does it mean?
Flaubert equates beauty with morality, suggesting aesthetic value inherently reflects ethical worth. It implies a unified standard for good and right.
In plain terms
Beauty and morality are the same thing.
What can you take from it?
Beauty and morality reflect the same truth.

Where it applies

  • art criticism
  • moral reasoning
  • design

Putting it to work

  • seek beauty in ethics
  • trust aesthetic judgment

Questions to consider

  • Can something beautiful be bad?
  • Is beauty ethical?

Another view

Bad people can create beautiful things.

More from Gustave Flaubert

  1. Our ignorance of history causes us to slander our own times.

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  2. He was happy now, without a care in the world. A meal alone with her, a stroll along the highway in the evening, the way she touched her hand to her hair, the …

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  3. The whole dream of democracy is to raise the proletarian to the level of bourgeois stupidity.

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