Quote by Gustave Flaubert: “Travel makes one modest. You see what a tiny place you occupy in the world.”

Leaving home and encountering other places, peoples, and ways of living shrinks your ego in the healthiest way. Flaubert understood that self-importance is largely a product of a narrow horizon, and that genuine perspective comes from confronting just how vast and varied the world actually is.

Flaubert wrote this in a letter dated 1846, before his major travels to North Africa and the Middle East. France's imperial expansion was bringing it into contact with cultures it barely understood, and Flaubert's response to travel was more curious than colonial.

French novelist considered one of the greatest prose stylists in literary history. His 1857 novel Madame Bovary, depicting a provincial doctor's wife destroyed by romantic illusions, was both a scandal and a masterpiece that helped define the realist novel.