Moralists observe people and reality turning their visual perceptions and their reflections into literary short forms of a fragmentary and open nature. At the same time, they scrutinize visual perception itself highlighting its cognitive limitations both explicitly, through content, and implicitly, using certain linguistic processes. The texts analysed here, written between the 16th and 18th century, tackle questions which are posed by cognitive sciences today, reaching similarly modern results. Furthermore, their way of writing can be correlated to certain characteristics of human perception. The prismatically refracted diversité of both man and reality is reflected in the diversité of language.