Michel de Montaigne Quotes

He that had never seen a river, imagined the first he met with to be the sea.

It's not only imagination, it's the distortion of the vision. You suddenly think, This person is idealistic, this person is strong, this person has dreams, when you know better most of the time. You put what you want to see on people.

I've never written a children's book, but when people meet me for the first time and I say I write books, they invariably reply, 'Children's books?' Maybe it's something about my face.

I let the audience use their imaginations. Can I help it if they misconstrue my suggestions?

Pray look better, Sir... those things yonder are no giants, but windmills.

All thought must, directly or indirectly, by way of certain characters, relate ultimately to intuitions, and therefore, with us, to sensibility, because in no other way can an object be given to us.

Size is not a reality, but a construct of the mind; and space a construct to contain constructs.

The first man to see an illusion by which men have flourished for centuries surely stands in a lonely place.

I don't know if you've ever noticed this, but first impressions are often entirely wrong.

It's not what you know, it's what you think you know.

Consider first, that great or bright infers not excellence.

Not my idea of God, but God. Not my idea of H., but H. Yes, and also not my idea of my neighbour, but my neighbour. For don't we often make this mistake as regards people who are still alive -- who are with us in the same room? Talking and acting not to the man himself but to the picture -- almost the précis -- we've made of him in our own minds? And he has to depart from it pretty widely before we even notice the fact.

The moment you label something, you take a step-I mean, you can never go back again to seeing it unlabelled.

The first thing that intellect does with an object is to class it with something else.

Don't assume the world evolved in the order in which you discovered it.

Everything that happens is at least one dimension smaller than you've imagined it to be.

Our first impressions are generated by our experiences and our environment, which means that we can change our first impressions... by changing the experiences that comprise those impressions.

Half the time you think your thinking you’re actually listening

Your mistake was not in imagining things you could not know—that is, after all, what imagination is for. Rather, your mistake was in unthinkingly treating what you imagined as though it were an accurate representation of the facts.

Sometimes you're fooled quickly. You want to be fooled. If you can't trust your first impression you're going to have a harder time than you should.

Just because things are obvious doesn't mean they're true.

Truth is a matter of the imagination. The soundest fact may fail or prevail in the style of its telling: like that singular organic jewel of our seas, which grows brighter as one woman wears it and, worn by another, dulls and goes to dust.

The imagination is a species of knowledge, knowledge that can take the form of discovery.

Imagination is the primary gift of human consciousness.

Whoever thought that he had understood something of me had merely construed something out of me, after his own image.