Exaggeration Quotes

“Long books, when read, are usually overpraised, because the reader wishes to convince others and himself that he has not wasted his time.”
― E.M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel

“Artists use frauds to make human beings seem more wonderful than they really are. Dancers show us human beings who move much more gracefully than human beings really move. Films and books and plays show us people talking much more entertainingly than people really talk, make paltry human enterprises seem important. Singers and musicians show us human beings making sounds far more lovely than human beings really make. Architects give us temples in which something marvelous is obviously going on. Actually, practically nothing is going on.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Wampeters, Foma and Granfalloons

“You can believe in whatsoever you like, but the truth remains the truth, no matter how sweet the lie may taste.”
― Michael Bassey Johnson

“The exaggerated dopamine sensitivity of the introvert leads one to believe that when in public, introverts, regardless of its validity, often feel to be the center of (unwanted) attention hence rarely craving attention. Extroverts, on the other hand, seem to never get enough attention. So on the flip side it seems as though the introvert is in a sense very external and the extrovert is in a sense very internal - the introvert constantly feels too much 'outerness' while the extrovert doesn't feel enough 'outerness'.”
― Criss Jami, Killosophy

“Whenever we want to combat our enemies, first and foremost we must start by understanding them rather than exaggerating their motives.”
― Criss Jami, Killosophy

“Like all young men, you greatly exaggerate the difference between one young woman and another.”
― Goerge Bernard Shaw, Major Barbara

“It doesn't matter what you do. In the end, you are going to be judged, and all the times that you're not at your most dignified are the ones that will be recalled in all their vivid, heartbreaking detail. And then of course these things will be distorted and exaggerated and replayed over and over, until eventually they turn into the essence of you: your cartoon.”
― Dan Chaon, Among the Missing

“It is always the novice who exaggerates.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters

“Mrs Joe was a very clean housekeeper, but had an exquisite art of making her clenliness more umcomfortable and unacceptable than dirt itself. Cleanliness is next to godliness, and some people do the same by their religion.”
― Charles Dickens, Great Expectations

“That's how it is with legends. The greater they sound, the more must've got left out.”
― Tim Tharp, Knights of the Hill Country

“Within every elaborate lie, a kernel of truth.”
― Marisha Pessl, Night Film

“There is a kind of gaping admiration that would fain roll Shakespeare and Bacon into one, to have a bigger thing to gape at; and a class of men who cannot edit one author without disparaging all others.”
― Robert Louis Stevenson, Edinburgh: Picturesque Notes

“I know of no place where the wind can be as icy and the damp so penetrating as in Oxford round about Easter time.”
― Vera Brittain, Testament of Youth

“He was becoming aware that there was no such thing as over-the-top with Lawrence Davenport, as long as you were talking to Lawrence Davenport about Lawrence Davenport.”
― Jeffrey Archer, A Prisoner of Birth

“Legends exaggerate.”
― Toba Beta, Master of Stupidity

“These days when Christians bicker they exaggerate passion into a legalistic belief and prosperity into a lukewarm belief.”
― Criss Jami, Killosophy

“That night she wrote a hasty sketch and showed it to Oliver. "It's all right," he said. "But I'd take out that stuff about Olympian mountains and the Stygian caverns of the mine. That's about used up, I should think.”
― Wallace Stegner, Angle of Repose

“Even among men lacking all distinction he inevitably stood out as a man lacking more distinction than all the rest, and people who met him were always impressed by how unimpressive he was”
― Joseph Heller, Catch-22

“Words have ruined the standard beauty and Numbers have exaggerated the weight of wealth.”
― Goitsemang Mvula

“Too much light for the eyes is as useless as darkness.”
― Amit Kalantri, Wealth of Words

“Fuck anybody who’d call a hill a mountain and name it after themselves.”
― A.D. Aliwat, In Limbo

“With too much respect you will end up as a weakling. Keep everything balanced. Don't exaggerate anything, nor please others for your own ruin.”
― Mwanandeke Kindembo

“Mrs Joe was a very clean housekeeper, but had an exquisite art of making her cleanliness more uncomfortable and unacceptable than dirt itself. Cleanliness is next to Godliness, and some people do the same by their religion.”
― Charles Dickens, Great Expectations

“I’ve long had reservations about the emancipatory rhetoric of past eras, especially the kind that treats liberation as a one-time event or event horizon. Nostalgia for prior notions of liberation—many of which depend heavily upon mythologies of revelation, violent upheaval, revolutionary machismo, and teleological progress—often strikes me as not useful or worse in the face of certain present challenges, such as global warming.”
― Maggie Nelson, On Freedom: Four Songs of Care and Constraint

“It is when we have made the ‘fear of fear’ the thing that we fear that we are no longer living in fear, rather we are living in the exaggeration of fear.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough

“He came across from the pond, the young man and his fridge travelling over land and sea searching for a meaning and purpose in their lives. We speak of Tony Hawks, the Fridge Man. Tony Hawks who came to live amongst us for all but a short while, a Messiah of sorts. We felt ourselves not worthy to touch the hem of his fridge, but then we realised that he was but an ordinary man, his fridge but a little fridge, the son of a bigger fridge--the Big Fridge--the huge, gigantic Fridge in the Sky.”
― Tony Hawks, Round Ireland with a Fridge

“Forever' is an illusion and 'Never' is an exaggeration.”
― Sadhana Devi Chauhan

“The truth could be a ticklish thing when stories were retold.”
― Daniel Thorman, Mayhem at the Mill

“She says there's been a few drops of snow in Yorkshire so the BBC are calling it a White Christmas. I say that's like calling me a vegetarian because I eat peas twice a week.”
― Ben Aitken, The Marmalade Diaries: The True Story of an Odd Couple

“Brigham Young spoke... with extreme hyperbole. He even admitted as much in 1848 when he acknowledged, 'I frequently sa[y] 'cut his infernal throat'; I don't mean any such thing.”
― W. Paul Reeve, Let’s Talk About Race and Priesthood