Michel de Montaigne Quotes

We are all captives of the picture in our head - our belief that the world we have experienced is the world that really exists.

We never stop to consider that our beliefs are only a relative truth that's always going to be distorted by all the knowledge we have stored in our memory.

The truth is whatever people will believe is the truth.

There is nothing that isn't true if you believe it; and nothing is true, believe it or not.

Truth is contrary to our nature, not so error, and this for a very simple reason: truth demands that we should recognize ourselves as limited, error flatters us that, in one way or another, we are unlimited.

It is only that my illusion is more real to me than reality. And so do we often build our world on an error, and cry out that the universe is falling to pieces, if any one but lift a finger to replace the error by truth.

There are minds constructed like the eyes of certain insects, which discern, with admirable distinctness, the most delicate lineaments and finest veins of the leaf which bears them, but are totally unable to take in the ensemble of the plant or shrub. When error has effected an entrance into such minds, it remains there impregnable, because no general view assists them in throwing off the chance impression of the moment.

All politicians operate within an Orwellian nimbus where words don't mean what they normally mean, but Rovism posits that there is no objective, verifiable reality at all. Reality is what you say it is.

In cases of major discrepancy its always reality thats got it wrong ... reality is frequently inaccurate.

Nonsense is that which does not fit into the prearranged patterns which we have superimposed on reality...Nonsense is nonsense only when we have not yet found that point of view from which it makes sense.

Contact with reality is not an all-or-nothing condition.

What people believe prevails over the truth.

Reality is irrelevant; Perception is everything.

Somehow even a popular fallacy has an aspect of truth when it suits one's own case.

Reality is a question of perspective.

In discussing these exceptions from the course of nature, the first question is, whether the fact be justly stated. That which is strange is delightful, and a pleasing error is not willingly detected.

"Is," "is," "is" — the idiocy of the word haunts me. If it were abolished, human thought might begin to make sense. I don't know what anything "is"; I only know how it seems to me at this moment.

I'm fascinated by the mysterious element that runs through our lives. Everyone is looking out of the world through their emotion and history. Nobody has an absolute reality.

We both know that, my friend, but a man's perception soon becomes his reality.

Your positions on EVERYTHING are based on the story you tell yourself and not some universal fact from the universal fact database.

A thing is never seen as it really is.

Remember that all is opinion. For what was said by the Cynic Monimus is manifest: and manifest too is the use of what was said, if a man receives what may be got out of it as far as it is true.

All you know is what you think you know, but that isn't always what's real.

A lot of what we're doing here deals with perception rather than truth. Many would argue that reality depends more on the former than the latter.

Who’s to say that it takes something like a drug to mess with your perception of reality? How did Hitler deceive a nation? How can one group of people look at the world and see one thing, and another see something completely different? One sees a town, another sees a desert. One sees beauty, another sees chaos.” The skin of this world,” he said quietly.