Quotations about Exaggeration

Some folks never exaggerate - they just remember big.  ~Attributed to both Audrey Snead and Chi Chi Rodriguez


An exaggeration is a truth that has lost its temper.  ~Kahlil Gibran


Nothing makes a fish bigger than almost being caught.  ~Author Unknown


If you add to the truth, you subtract from it.  ~The Talmud


Exaggeration is to paint a snake and add legs.  ~Proverb


There are people so addicted to exaggeration they can't tell the truth without lying.  ~Josh Billings


Man is inclined to exaggerate almost everything - except his own mistakes.  ~Author Unknown


To exaggerate is to weaken.  ~Jean François de La Harpe, Melanie, 1770


Exaggeration is a blood relation to falsehood and nearly as blamable.  ~Hosea Ballou


By speaking, by thinking, we undertake to clarify things, and that forces us to exacerbate them, dislocate them, schematize them.  Every concept is in itself an exaggeration.  ~Jose Ortega y Gasset


All news is an exaggeration of life.  ~Daniel Schorr


All passions exaggerate; and they are passions only because they do exaggerate.  ~Nicolas Chamfort


There is no one who does not exaggerate.  In conversation, men are encumbered with personality, and talk too much.  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson


False eloquence is exaggeration; true eloquence is emphasis.  ~William Alger


Never exaggerate your faults, your friends will attend to that.  ~Bob Edwards


'Tis a rule of manners to avoid exaggeration.  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson


Exaggeration misleads the credulous and offends the perceptive.  ~Eliza Cook


There's no disappointment in memory, and one's exaggerations are always on the good side.  ~George Eliot


What makes us discontented with our condition is the absurdly exaggerated idea we have of the happiness of others.  ~French Proverb


We exaggerate misfortune and happiness alike.  We are never as bad off or as happy as we say we are.  ~Honore de Balzac


Some so speak in exaggerations and superlatives that we need to make a large discount from their statements before we can come at their real meaning.  ~Tryon Edwards


We overstate the ills of life, and take
Imagination... down our earth to rake...
~Elizabeth Barrett Browning


Alcohol is perfectly consistent in its effects upon man.  Drunkenness is merely an exaggeration.  A foolish man drunk becomes maudlin; a bloody man, vicious; a coarse man, vulgar.  ~Willa Sibert Cather


Every vice is only an exaggeration of a necessary and virtuous function.  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson


Exaggeration is in the course of things.  Nature sends no creature, no man into the world, without adding a small excess of his proper quality.  Given the planet, it is still necessary to add the impulse; so, to every creature nature added a little violence of direction in its proper path, a shove to put it on its way; in every instance, a slight generosity, a drop too much.  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson


All cartoon characters and fables must be exaggeration, caricatures.  It is the very nature of fantasy and fable.  ~Walt Disney


To a small man every greater is an exaggeration.  ~Henry David Thoreau


It is human to exaggerate the merits of the dead.  ~Mark Twain


Exaggeration, the inseparable companion of greatness.  ~Voltaire


We aim above the mark, to hit the mark.  Every act hath some falsehood of exaggeration in it.  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson


How many may a man of diffusive conversation count among his acquaintances, whose lives have been signalized by numberless escapes; who never cross the river but in a storm, or take a journey into the country without more adventures than befel the knights-errant of ancient times in pathless forests or enchanted castles!  How many must he know, to whom portents and prodigies are of daily occurrence; and for whom nature is hourly working wonders invisible to every other eye, only to supply them with subjects of conversation?  ~Samuel Johnson