Scilicet et fluvius qui visus maximus ei,
Titus Lucretius Carus, De rerum natura, Book VI.
Qui non ante aliquem majorem vidit; et ingens
Arbor, homoque videtur, et omnia de genere omni
Maxima quae vidit quisque, haec ingentia fingit.
“A little river seems to him, who has never seen a larger river, a mighty stream; and so with other things — a tree, a man — anything appears greatest to him that never knew a greater.”
Lucretius, On the Nature of Things, Book VI (quoted in The Essays of Michel de Montaigne, tr. W. C. Hazlitt)