54 Quotes About Exaggeration

• Exaggeration is the melodramatic child of truth. – Khang Kijarro Nguyen

 

• Adding more bull to bull yields bigger bull. – Cathy Burnham Martin

 

• Exaggeration is to paint a snake and add legs. – Unknown

 

• Exaggeration, the inseparable companion of greatness. – Voltaire

 

• Every exaggeration of the truth once detected by others destroys our credibility and makes all that we do and say suspect. – Stephen Covey

 

• Man is inclined to exaggerate almost everything,  except his own mistakes. – Unknown

 

• You always get exaggerated notions about things you don’t know anything about. – Albert Camus

 

• Exaggeration is a prodigality of the judgment which shows the narrowness of one’s knowledge or one’s taste. – Baltasar Gracian

 

• Exaggeration is truth that has lost its temper. – Khalil Gibran

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

 

• Never believe extraordinary characters which you hear of people. Depend upon it, they are exaggerated. You do not see one man shoot a great deal higher than another. – Samuel Johnson

 

• All the exaggerations are right, if they exaggerate the right thing. – G.K. Chesterton

 

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

 

• Don’t, Sir, accustom yourself to use big words for little matters. – Samuel Johnson

 

• I was always conscious of that weak point of mine, and sometimes very much afraid of it. I exaggerate everything, that is where I go wrong. – Fyodor Dostoyevsky

 

• Exaggeration misleads the credulous and offends the perceptive. – Eliza Cook

 

• People add color to their story because they think it happened in black and white. – Tawny Lara

 

• Exaggeration is lying. It does not take long for the people in the community to get the habit of discounting twenty-five percent of all you say. If you continually overstate and vociferate you must keep on getting louder, until you soon become incoherent. – Frank Crane

 

• That’s how it is with legends. The greater they sound, the more must’ve got left out. – Tim Tharp

 

• He who cannot exaggerate is not qualified to utter truth. – Henry David Thoreau

 

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

 

• The temptation to vivify the tale and make it walk abroad on its own legs is hard to deny. – Gelett Burgess

 

• An element of exaggeration clings to the popular judgment: great vices are made greater, great virtues greater also; interesting incidents are made more interesting, softer legends more soft. – Walter Bagehot

 

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

 

• Exaggeration! was ever any virtue attributed to a man without exaggeration? was ever any vice, without infinite exaggeration? Do we not exaggerate ourselves to ourselves, or do we recognize ourselves for the actual men we are? Are we not all great men? Yet what are we actually, to speak of? We live by exaggeration. – Henry David Thoreau

 

• Like I said, all comedy is based on exaggeration, big or small, whatever you can get away with. – Drew Carey

 

• Thought is a process of exaggeration. The refusal to exaggerate is not infrequently an alibi for the disinclination to think or praise. – Eric Hoffer

 

• Poets and writers who are in love with the superlative all want to do more than they can. – Friedrich Nietzsche

 

• Stop telling such outlandish tales. Stop turning minnows into whales. – Dr. Seuss

 

• Danger lies in the writer becoming the victim of his own exaggeration, losing the exact notion of sincerity, and in the end coming to despise truth itself as something too cold, too blunt for his purpose—as, in fact, not good enough for his insistent emotion. From laughter and tears the descent is easy to sniveling and giggles. – Joseph Conrad

 

• People exaggerate the value of things they haven’t got: everybody worships truth and unselfishness because they have no experience with them. – George Bernard Shaw

 

• It is the essence of truth that it is never excessive, We must not resort to the flame where only light is required. – Victor Hugo

 

• There are some people so addicted to exaggeration that they can’t tell the truth without lying. – Josh Billings

 

• 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

 

• But exaggeration establishes no good understanding between the reader and the author. It is a solemn appeal to our credulity, and we are right to resent it. It is the violence of a weakling hand—the worst manner of violence. – Alice Meynell

 

• Unless you embellish, you can’t tell the truth. – Marty Rubin

 

• Sometimes in life we blow things out of proportion because proportion is so dull. – Robert Brault

 

• To exaggerate is to weaken. – Jean François de La Harpe

 

• Exaggeration is a branch of lying. – Baltasar Gracian

 

• Exaggeration is a standard peculiarity of man. To deprecate is often a form of exaggeration which people do not notice, because it appears to be its opposite. – Idries Shah

 

• It is always the novice who exaggerates. – C.S. Lewis

 

• He’s the type who makes mountains out of molehills and then sells climbing equipment. – Ivern Ball

 

• Nothing makes a fish bigger than almost being caught. – Unknown

 

• Men of great conversational powers almost universally practise a sort of lively sophistry and exaggeration which deceives for the moment both themselves and their auditors. – Thomas Babington Macaulay

 

• Exaggeration in every sense is as essential to newspaper writing as it is to the writing of plays: for the point is to make as much as possible of every occurrence. – Arthur Schopenhauer

 

• Exaggeration is the cheapest form of humor. – Barbara Mertz

 

• 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. – José Ortega y Gasset

 

• If you use the term ‘over-exaggerate,’ you know the definition neither of ‘exaggerate’ nor of ‘over.’ – Rodney Ulyate

 

• Eschew the monumental. Shun the Epic. All the guys who can paint great big pictures can paint great small ones. – Ernest Hemingway

 

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

 

• When we exaggerate the tenderness of our friends towards us, it is often less from gratitude than from a desire to exhibit our own merit. – Unknown

 

• We exaggerate misfortune and happiness alike. We are never as bad off or as happy as we say we are. – Honoré de Balzac

 

• I know exaggerators of both kinds: people whose lies are only picturesque adjectives, and people whose picturesque adjectives are only lies. – Katherine Fullerton Gerould

 

• Never exaggerate. It is a matter of great importance to forego superlatives, in part to avoid offending the truth, and in part to avoid cheapening your judgment. Exaggeration wastes distinction and testifies to the paucity of your understanding and taste. – Baltasar Gracian