"Exaggeration" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... but quite different. This was a young girl, of perhaps seventeen, in a flowing dress of some soft white stuff, gathered at the waist by a broad red ribbon. She was without hat or shawl, and wore her hair, which was very long and very black, hanging loosely down her shoulders, in exaggeration of a style of coiffure that afterwards came into fashion. She was moving slowly and in the manner of a person not accustomed to walking. She was a lady—Lynde saw that at a glance—probably some city-bred bird of passage, resting for ...
— The Queen of Sheba & My Cousin the Colonel • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... immense importance. Anaxagoras, it is said, wrote a treatise in which he maintained that the human race would never have become human if it had not been for the hand. I do not know that there was so very much exaggeration about that. It was certainly of great significance that the particular race of mammals whose intelligence increased far enough to make it worth while for natural selection to work upon intelligence alone was the race which ...
— The Meaning of Infancy • John Fiske
... Snorro Sturleson.—"The old Norwegian ell was less than the present ell; and Thorlasius reckons, in a note on this chapter, that Harold's stature would be about four Danish ells; viz. about eight feet."—Laing's note to the text. Allowing for the exaggeration of the chronicler, it seems probable, at least, that Hardrada exceeded seven feet. Since (as Laing remarks in the same note), and as we shall see hereafter, "our English Harold offered him, according to both English and ...
— Harold, Complete - The Last Of The Saxon Kings • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... with her winking diamonds and her old point lace, which yawned over her lean neck, that the distinction she had always aimed at seemed achieved at last by an ironic exaggeration. ...
— The Wheel of Life • Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow
... of the main grounds on which the Darwinian theory rests. Of the abundance of detailed illustrations from which it may derive additional support no adequate idea can be formed, except by careful perusal of its author's own writings, and these fortunately may without much exaggeration be said to be in everybody's hands. Of the arguments that have been brought forward in opposition to it, all seem to me to be susceptible of very complete answers, and one or two of the strongest, of answers more complete than they have yet received. True, there is no disputing ...
— Old-Fashioned Ethics and Common-Sense Metaphysics - With Some of Their Applications • William Thomas Thornton
... occasions of these schemes. After the General had mentioned that the left did so well the other day Halstead said in the Mess: 'Yes, our left flank was fine, thanks to Floyd; he managed it like a general!' That is, of course exaggeration in the opposite direction; I make no claim to any talents of that kind: but it is encouraging for one's company commander to talk like that, more encouraging than the way the second-in-command, Giffin, behaves. Giffin is quite agreeable ...
— At Ypres with Best-Dunkley • Thomas Hope Floyd
... little mistress, if you only knew how much I suffer from the excessive heat, and the privation in which I live! Without exaggeration, my testicles are enormous. My member is as large, straight, and stiff as my arm. I am mad from desire for you. I had the unhappy idea of going to bed again. My mind was full of a dream I had had, and of which ...
— The Romance of Lust - A classic Victorian erotic novel • Anonymous
... was of an iron hardness and heroic mould. She would have died rather than have told a lie, and classed as lies any form of evasion, deceit, concealment or even artistic exaggeration. ...
— The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909-1910) • Charlotte Perkins Gilman
... even contemporary, such statements might suggest a violent suspicion of exaggeration. We possess the means of testing it. The Irish State Papers of the time contain the ample reports and letters, from day to day, of the energetic and resolute Englishmen employed in council or in ...
— Spenser - (English Men of Letters Series) • R. W. Church
... turned the advice to ridicule, laughed at the idea of danger, left both their gates wide open, and placed there, it is said, two snow images as mock sentinels. A French account declares that the village contained eighty houses, which is certainly an exaggeration. There had been some festivity during the evening, but it was now over; and the primitive villagers, fathers, mothers, children, and infants, lay buried in unconscious sleep. They were simple peasants and rude woodsmen, but with human affections ...
— Count Frontenac and New France under Louis XIV • Francis Parkman
... had been conscious of, in a momentary glimpse full of the exaggeration of fever, had not indeed been so expeditious as she believed. The doctor, it is true, had been pronouncing her death-warrant when she saw him holding her wrist, and wondered what he did there in the middle of the night; but she had been very ill before this, and the conclusion ...
— Old Lady Mary - A Story of the Seen and the Unseen • Margaret O. (Wilson) Oliphant
... you see, there's only one pleasure left your humble servant, and that's exaggeration—well, that was the way I spent four years in Moscow. I can't tell you, my dear sir, how quickly, how fearfully quickly, that time passed; it's positively painful and vexatious to remember. Some mornings one gets up, and it's like sliding downhill on little ...
— A Sportsman's Sketches - Volume II • Ivan Turgenev
... is, to kill your enemy and not get killed yourself, and they can take cover more skillfully than any other people. In all our Indian wars, from the Atlantic westward, with regulars or militia, I believe it would not be an exaggeration to say that the whites have lost ten to one in killed and wounded. But the battle of Wood Lake was quite an open fight, and so rapidly conducted and concluded that we have a very accurate account of the loss of the enemy. He had no time or opportunity ...
— The History of Minnesota and Tales of the Frontier • Charles E. Flandrau
... of their faces, were all marked after the fashion of these Bissayans. And indeed, for a barbarous people, naked, and of so little reason, one could not restrain himself, at sight of them, from thanking God for having created them. And do not think this exaggeration, for it was so. These people invited us to their port, and were in turn invited to our flagship, and about forty of them came aboard. In comparison with them we appeared to be men of less than ordinary ...
— History of the Philippine Islands Vols 1 and 2 • Antonio de Morga
... of their ships and crews, while they themselves neglected fundamental precautions for their safety. It was the fashion to look upon drowning not only as an incident of the profession, but a natural finish to a sailor's career; and it is no exaggeration to say that many people thought the poor fellow preferred this form of extinction to any other. The owner who squared his conscience by throwing the responsibility of the seaman's safety on to Almighty ...
— The Shellback's Progress - In the Nineteenth Century • Walter Runciman
... a gradation of Beauty must be observed, by which alone the full Beauty concentrated in the focus becomes visible; and from an exaggeration of particulars proceeds an equipoise of the whole. Here, then, the limited and characteristic finds its place; and theory at least should direct the painter, not so much to the narrow space in which the entire Beauty is concentrically collected, as to the ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: - Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, Volume 5. • Various
... been gathered on it in the course of a single season. On first hearing it, this sounds an improbable statement; but any one who has been upon the mountain in a good "whinberry season" as it is called, will readily understand that this is no exaggeration. To the poor people for miles around, the "whinberry picking" is the great event of the year. The whole family betake themselves to the hill with the early morning, carrying with them their provisions for the day; and not unfrequently ...
— A Night in the Snow - or, A Struggle for Life • Rev. E. Donald Carr
... no exaggeration in the language used to describe the horrible outrages visited upon whole communities of innocent and helpless people. The truth of these terrible charges in their most hideous form, was established by unbiased American testimony, by Dr, Dillon, an eye witness, and by the ...
— The Grand Old Man • Richard B. Cook
... nose served to bring him sharp up, when he ran too fast. No sooner were these arrangements made than away he went at a rapid pace ahead, towing us at the rate of at least six knots an hour—I like always to be under the mark, for fear of being thought guilty of exaggeration. By hauling in, now on one side, now on the other, we managed to steer him very well on our ...
— Marmaduke Merry - A Tale of Naval Adventures in Bygone Days • William H. G. Kingston
... and despair which transpired in the snowy Sierra in the winter of 1846-7, need no exaggeration, no embellishment. From all the works heretofore published, from over one thousand letters received from the survivors, from ample manuscript, and from personal interviews with the most important actors in the tragedy, the facts have been ...
— History of the Donner Party • C.F. McGlashan
... convenience. Then, indeed, he was like the man in "The Hunting of the Snark," who said, "I told you once, I told you twice, what I tell you three times is true." That what I have supposed said, however, above about the jemmy is no exaggeration of Mr. Darwin's attitude as regards design in organism will appear from the passage about the eye already referred to, which it may perhaps be as well to quote in ...
— Luck or Cunning? • Samuel Butler
... adoption of the different modes of carrying on what John Bunyan called "the Holy War," "the Siege of Man's Soul," must indeed be always controlled by the determination to keep the high, paramount, universal end always in view; by the vigilant endeavor to repress the exaggeration, to denounce the follies and the falsehoods which infect even the best attempts of narrow and fallible, though good and faithful, servants of their Lord. But, if once we have this principle fixed in our minds, it surely becomes a solace to remember that the soul of man is won by a thousand ...
— Chips from a German Workshop - Volume IV - Essays chiefly on the Science of Language • Max Muller
... the whole Federation," Baron Rathmore declared. He was a politician and never let exaggeration ...
— Space Viking • Henry Beam Piper
... palaeolithic men.(4) Sometimes the cave-dwellings are superposed in storeys, and they certainly recall much more the nesting colonies of swallows than the dens of carnivores. As to the flint implements discovered in those caves, to use Lubbock's words, "one may say without exaggeration that they are numberless." The same is true of other palaeolithic stations. It also appears from Lartet's investigations that the inhabitants of the Aurignac region in the south of France partook of tribal meals at the burial of their dead. So ...
— Mutual Aid • P. Kropotkin
... lonely waif upon unknown shores. What lay before her, God alone knew. Clemence felt grieved, too, to find that she was not liked by the village people. Old Mrs. Wynn took care to inform her of that, with a due amount of exaggeration. Her crime consisted in minding her own business, and letting others do the same—and they called her gentle reticence, "airs," said she felt above common folks, and prophesied that any amount of evil would befall her. She did not know that it is a trait of human nature ...
— Clemence - The Schoolmistress of Waveland • Retta Babcock
... that there is a little picturesque exaggeration in these letters, and that Balzac was not quite so lonely all the time as he was when he wrote to her. He compares her with the women he meets, always to her advantage, of course, and in his letters he constantly uses extracts from her letters, ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 13 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Lovers • Elbert Hubbard
... himself got his hand placed upon an old Latin Bible, not one word of which he could read; and some followed one mode of self-defence, and some another, against the expected efforts of the stranger, whose proceedings at his other places of call had been all related at Wat Webster's, with an exaggeration they perhaps stood little in need of. The stranger cared nothing for these indications, not a cinder; and took ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland Volume 17 • Alexander Leighton
... high-powered French motor car. Well, there's an even higher powered French maid. She's the kind that you could describe as "and suite," without the slightest snobbishness or exaggeration, when registering your name in the visitors' book at a hotel. The car, which Larry told Pat to buy for herself as a birthday present from him, is forty horsepower, I believe; whereas I'm much mistaken if Angele isn't about a hundred demon-power. She's geared terribly high, can "crank" herself ...
— The Lightning Conductor Discovers America • C. N. (Charles Norris) Williamson and A. M. (Alice Muriel)
... coming!—But, indeed, as to the temper there was in men and women, does not this one fact say enough: the height SUSPICION had risen to? Preternatural we often called it; seemingly in the language of exaggeration: but listen to the cold deposition of witnesses. Not a musical Patriot can blow himself a snatch of melody from the French Horn, sitting mildly pensive on the housetop, but Mercier will recognise it to be a signal which one Plotting Committee is making to another. Distraction ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... even received from Morocco, representing its treasures, as surpassing those of Mexico and Peru, and in 1618, a company was formed in London, for the express purpose of penetrating to the country of gold, and to Timbuctoo. Exaggeration stepped in to inflame the minds of the speculators, with the enormous wealth which awaited them in the interior of Africa. The roofs of the houses were represented to be covered with plates of gold, that the bottoms of the rivers glistened ...
— Lander's Travels - The Travels of Richard Lander into the Interior of Africa • Robert Huish
... (and "the half is not told") sounds to the unobservant like a harsh exaggeration, an imaginative travesty of the principles of labor organizations. It is not a travesty; it has no element of exaggeration. Not in the last twenty-five years has a great strike or lockout occurred in this country without supplying facts, notorious and ...
— The Shadow On The Dial, and Other Essays - 1909 • Ambrose Bierce
... the idle conceit of a dreamer out of touch with reality to assert that it is principles which mainly matter and that it is the ideal which is the ultimate reality. It may seem a ludicrous exaggeration to assert that a mere abstract scientific theory, apparently so innocuous as is the German race theory, could be held responsible for so titanic a catastrophe. Surely there seems to be here no relation and no proportion between cause and effect. Yet it ...
— German Problems and Personalities • Charles Sarolea
... Michelangelo in later life finished that great chapel of Pope Julius (the Sistine), he never rose halfway to the same pitch of power; his genius never afterwards attained to the force of those first studies." Allowing for some exaggeration due to enthusiasm for things enjoyed in early youth, this is a very remarkable statement. Cellini knew the frescoes of the Sistine well, yet he maintains that they were inferior in power and beauty to the Battle of Pisa. It seems hardly credible; but, if we believe it, the legend of Michelangelo's ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds
... beheld the round of selfish, thoughtless gaiety, in which the images and intrigues of Madame Dubarry and Marie Antoinette, of Choiseul and Rohan, of Louis and Richelieu, were strangely mingled and distorted by exaggeration, as they sifted down from the Court through several layers of brains until they reached the world of the newly awakened laborer. Below him would have yawned, in all its hideousness, the blackness of the pit, the social cellar into which he would have seen thousands ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 23, October, 1891 • Various
... morrow; and never did the teachers more gladly welcome the approach of holy time. A blessed Sabbath followed such a preparation day. During morning service, almost all were in tears. At dinner, many seats were vacant. It may seem an exaggeration, but it was literally true, that no voice was heard all that day save the voice of prayer. Miss Fiske has never known such a Sabbath before, nor since. In the afternoon, the feeling was overpowering. There was no request for prayer, but unbroken stillness and ...
— Woman And Her Saviour In Persia • A Returned Missionary
... houses. If they had attempted, occasionally, to mingle the social and personal with the commercial Fanny had not resented their attitude. She had accepted their admiration and refused their invitations with equal good nature, and thus retained their friendship. It is not exaggeration to say that she looked upon Michael Fenger much as she had upon these genial fellow-workers. A woman as straightforward and direct as she has what is known as a single-track mind in such matters. It is your soft and silken mollusc type of woman whose mind pursues a slimy and ...
— Fanny Herself • Edna Ferber
... sovereign essential oil, on the top of Petrarch's rose-water. Henceforward the world possesses a new kind of love: the love of Romeo, of Hamlet, of Bassanio, of Viola, and of Juliet; the love of the love poems of Shelley, of Tennyson, of Browning and Browning's wife. A love whose blindness, exaggeration of passion, all that might have made it foolish and impracticable, leads no longer to folly and sin, but to an intenser activity of mankind's imagination of the good and beautiful, to a momentary realization in our fancy of all our vague dreams of perfection; ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. II • Vernon Lee
... adopted Christian language and manners and modes of thought. But always and everywhere it is to be detected by its antagonism to the Christian estimate of sin. The spirit which accuses Christianity of gross exaggeration in this respect, is the very spirit of the world. Now, as in days of long ago, when torture and death hung on the refusal to scatter a few grains of incense before the statue of Caesar, the same eternal choice is presented ...
— Gloria Crucis - addresses delivered in Lichfield Cathedral Holy Week and Good Friday, 1907 • J. H. Beibitz
... Empire itself has enjoyed under Liberal rule a period of prosperous tranquillity, favourable both to development and consolidation; and it is no exaggeration to say that it was never more strong or more peacefully united than at the present moment. The confidence which the whole country, irrespective of party, feels in Sir Edward Grey in the present European ...
— Liberalism and the Social Problem • Winston Spencer Churchill
... which Charlotte sat during a stay at Dr. Wheelwright's in Phillimore Place—entirely flattering. Many of Charlotte's friends were pleased that it should be so, but there can be no doubt that the magnificent expanse of forehead was an exaggeration. Charlotte's forehead was ...
— Charlotte Bronte and Her Circle • Clement K. Shorter
... The Extent of Foreign Immigration.—So much for the inflow from the country districts. But there is another inflow which is drawing close attention, the inflow of cheap foreign labour into our towns. Here again we have first to guard against some exaggeration. It is not true that German, Polish, and Russian Jews are coming over in large battalions to steal all the employment of the English working-man, by under-selling him in the labour-market. In the first place, it should be ...
— Problems of Poverty • John A. Hobson
... hold no water,' 'that which is not bread,' 'husks that the swine did eat'—these are not exaggerated phrases for the good gifts which God gives for our delight, and which become profitless and delusive by our exclusive attachment to them. There is no need for exaggeration. These worldly possessions have a good in them, they contribute to ease and grace in life, they save from carking cares and mean anxieties, they add many a comfort and many a source of culture. But, after all, a true, lofty life may be lived with a very small modicum. There is ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... asserted that the body color of the Negrito is black, but this is a gross exaggeration. It is a dark brown, several shades darker than the Malay, with a yellowish or saffron "undertone" showing on the less exposed parts of the body. As compared with the lighter colored peoples about him his color ...
— The Negrito and Allied Types in the Philippines and The Ilongot or Ibilao of Luzon • David P. Barrows
... other ministers of the time, and his seeming distance from his congregation was doubtless owing to the deep reverence in which the ministerial office was universally held among our predecessors. My own graven-image worship of him was only a childish exaggeration of the general feeling of grown people around me. He seemed to us an inhabitant of a Sabbath-day sphere, while we belonged to the every-day world. I distinctly remember the day of my christening, when I ...
— A New England Girlhood • Lucy Larcom
... Exaggeration is a propensity which seems common to ambassadors. We certainly have never seen an ambassadorial correspondence, in which the most groundless views did not make a large part of its communications. The ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 348 • Various
... personal sympathies are with the French, I tried to observe dispassionately and accurately, and have scrupulously aimed to present my facts uncolored by preference or prejudice. In war, exaggeration and misrepresentation play an accepted part in the tactics of belligerents, but it should be the aim of a neutral to observe with an unbiased mind, no matter what the state of his emotions may be. Otherwise, the data he collects can have no value ...
— The Note-Book of an Attache - Seven Months in the War Zone • Eric Fisher Wood
... fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Nor did the wronged have any means of redress; in the city, the squires (yunker) controlled the judges' bench; in the country, the landlord, invested with criminal jurisdiction, was the knight, the Abbot or the Bishop. Accordingly, it is a violent exaggeration that, amid such morals and customs, the nobility and rulers had a particular respect for their wives and daughters, and carried them on their hands as a sort of higher beings, let alone that they cultivated such respect for the wives and daughters of the townsmen and peasants, for whom both ...
— Woman under socialism • August Bebel
... even to grudgingness; the other gay, buoyant, enthusiastic, and ardent; and they who only saw her of an evening in all the exultation of her flattered beauty, followed about by a train of admiring worshippers, addressed in all that exaggeration of language Italy sanctions, pampered by caresses, and honoured by homage on every side, little knew by what dreary torpor of heart and mind that joyous ecstasy they witnessed had been preceded, nor ...
— Lord Kilgobbin • Charles Lever
... coast. That was the strain of excited feeling in him that went along with the notes of Mirah's song; but when it ceased he moved from his seat with the reflection that he had been falling into an exaggeration of his own importance, and a ridiculous readiness to accept Gwendolen's view of himself, as if he could really have any decisive power ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... when the commonwealth is flourishing and happy, you would repeal a law that was made against them during a war, and in times of distress. I know that these and other similar strong expressions, for the purpose of exaggeration, are easily found; and, mild as Marcus Cato is in his disposition, yet in his speeches he is not only vehement, but sometimes even austere. What new thing, let me ask, have the matrons done in coming out into public in a body on an occasion which nearly concerns themselves? ...
— History of Rome, Vol III • Titus Livius
... guilty of gross exaggeration was shown by their evidence as to the desperate injuries the combatants had inflicted upon one another. Of Paradise in particular it had been alleged that his features were obliterated. The jury had before them in the dock the man ...
— Cashel Byron's Profession • George Bernard Shaw
... the gilded, was not originally the name of the country. The territory subsequently distinguished by that appellation was at first known as the country of el Rey Dorado, the Gilded King.) Such were the motives which prompted exaggeration on the part of those writers who have given most reputation to the Amazons of America; but these motives do not, I think, suffice for entirely rejecting a tradition, which is spread among various nations having no communications one ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America V2 • Alexander von Humboldt
... one suppose that this is in any degree an exaggeration of the present state of things in Venice. Only about a month after the adventure of the two ladies, two individuals of that city were condemned for having been in correspondence with political exiles. ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 440 - Volume 17, New Series, June 5, 1852 • Various
... that she meant no harm, and did no harm, and that it has been all malice and exaggeration. But one can ...
— The Marriage of William Ashe • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... count, prince, or other who can have had a country at his will as James van Artevelde had for a long time." It is possible that, as some historians have thought, Froissart, being less favorable to burghers than to princes, did not deny himself a little exaggeration in this portrait of a great burgher-patriot transformed by the force of events and passions into a ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... thought from my letters that I was telling them fables. Magnetism was then energetically denied by all the schools of medicine, and without saying that they doubted either my word or that of the provincial doctors, they said we could not have observed thoroughly, or else we had been misled by the exaggeration which patients are apt to indulge in. But they were forced to change their minds when they saw my daughter; and it is to the phenomena they then observed that the great researches made in these latter days are owing; for I must tell you that they class my daughter's singular state as a form of neurosis. ...
— The Brotherhood of Consolation • Honore de Balzac
... treatment of the world and the people in it. Janie had responsibilities—banks and buildings full of them—and a heart to please into the bargain. Singularly complicated questions are rather cruelly put before young women, who must solve them on peril of—— It would sound like exaggeration ...
— Tristram of Blent - An Episode in the Story of an Ancient House • Anthony Hope
... It was manifest that he made his decision solely upon the evidence given by Sarah Althea herself, whom he nevertheless branded in his opinion as a perjurer, suborner of perjury, and forger. Lest this should seem an exaggeration his own words are here quoted. She stated that she was introduced by Sharon to certain parties as his wife. Of her statements to ...
— Personal Reminiscences of Early Days in California with Other Sketches; To Which Is Added the Story of His Attempted Assassination by a Former Associate on the Supreme Bench of the State • Stephen Field; George C. Gorham
... one March night there sprang up between us a dispute, which rendered my departure necessary. Northmour spoke hotly, I remember, and I suppose I must have made some tart rejoinder. He leaped from his chair and grappled me; I had to fight, without exaggeration, for my life; and it was only with a great effort that I mastered him, for he was near as strong in body as myself, and seemed filled with the devil. The next morning, we met on our usual terms; but I judged ...
— New Arabian Nights • Robert Louis Stevenson
... nearest to success in a plain narrative, the three stories, as stories, have less than the almost perfect art of the best of Mary Lamb's: of Father's Wedding-Day, which Landor, with wholly pardonable exaggeration, called 'with the sole exception of the Bride of Lammermoor, the most beautiful tale in prose composition in any language, ancient or modern.' There is something of an incomparable kind of story-telling in ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... charm to which Southerners are peculiarly susceptible, and also an unusual gift of oratory which won him favour with a public accustomed to the eloquence of Daniel Webster and Wendell Phillips. These things told with the Democratic majority. That the treaty 'was floated through on champagne' is an exaggeration; but there was undoubtedly much hospitality shown on both sides and much good fellowship. Ten days after his arrival at Washington Lord Elgin was able to tell Mr Marcy that the Democrats would not oppose the treaty, and on the fifth of {152} June it was actually signed. ...
— The Winning of Popular Government - A Chronicle of the Union of 1841 • Archibald Macmechan
... or less intimate touch with everyone who was working at it. In reading the letters we move amongst great names. With an extraordinary charm of persuasive correspondence he was constantly suggesting, criticising and stimulating. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that from the quiet of his study at Down he was founding and directing a ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others
... white. When, in spring, the trees flower, it is as though fleeciest masses of cloud faintly tinged by sunset had floated down from the highest sky to fold themselves about the branches. This comparison is no poetical exaggeration; neither is it original: it is an ancient Japanese description of the most marvellous floral exhibition which nature is capable of making. The reader who has never seen a cherry-tree blossoming in Japan cannot possibly imagine the delight of the ...
— Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan • Lafcadio Hearn
... named president by a strong majority. His nomination redoubled the confidence of La Gironde in its force. A man extravagant in everything, he had in his character the fire of his language. He was the exaggeration of La Gironde—one of those men whose ideas rush to their head when the intoxication of success or fear urges them to rashness, and when they renounce prudence, ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol XII. - Modern History • Arthur Mee
... been a man, for he never was a boy. And the reason lay in the persecution which overclouded his school-days. Of that persecution's effect upon him, he has left us, in The Revolt of Islam, a picture which to many or most people very probably seems a poetical exaggeration; partly because Shelley appears to have escaped physical brutality, partly because adults are inclined to smile tenderly at childish sorrows which are not caused by physical suffering. That he escaped for the most part bodily ...
— Shelley - An Essay • Francis Thompson
... to give some account of the slave-trade of East Africa, it was necessary to keep far within the truth, in order not to be thought guilty of exaggeration; but in sober seriousness the subject does not admit of exaggeration. To overdraw its evils is a simple impossibility. The sights I have seen, though common incidents of the traffic, are so nauseous that I always strive to drive them from memory. In the case of most disagreeable ...
— The Last Journals of David Livingstone, in Central Africa, from 1865 to His Death, Volume II (of 2), 1869-1873 • David Livingstone
... with a new mystery, which has features so remarkable, that it would not be an exaggeration to describe this crime as the Murder Mystery of the Century. A well-known figure in London Society, Mr. Thornton Lyne, head of an important commercial organisation, a poet of no mean quality, and a ...
— The Daffodil Mystery • Edgar Wallace
... that honor as he had refused political honors and positions. He said that he "wished to be nothing"; and when in 1848 he was elected to the Constitutional Assembly, he resigned his seat almost immediately. He has been accused of affectation, and of exaggeration in his disinterestedness; but he was naturally timid in public, and preferred to exert an influence over his countrymen by his songs rather than by his voice ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... well. It is worthy to be the crowning work of his long life of public service. His style is of that best kind which is never remarked upon, but serves as a clear medium through which the events he portrays are seen without distortion or exaggeration. He has done his country one more service in entire consistency with those that have filled up the whole course of his honorable and beneficent life. We have said that this is fit to be the crowning work of Mr. Giddings's life; but we trust that it is far from being the last that ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 11, September, 1858 • Various
... specific incident in American history, may be supposed to have occurred a few months previous to Hamilton's retirement from Washington's Cabinet in 1795 and a few years before the political ingenuities of Burr — who has been characterized, without much exaggeration, as the inventor of American politics — began to be conspicuously formidable to the Federalists. These activities on the part of Burr resulted, as the reader will remember, in the Burr-Jefferson tie for the Presidency ...
— The Three Taverns • Edwin Arlington Robinson
... result of indigestion, assisted by imagination and over-doctoring—a prodigious nightmare. It is so exceedingly indistinct, that I don't know why it's frightful—but I know it is. I can only make out that it is an immense array of shapeless things, which appear to be planted on a vast exaggeration of the lazy-tongs that used to bear the toy soldiers, and to be slowly coming close to my eyes, and receding to an immeasurable distance. When it comes closest, it is worse. In connection with it I descry remembrances ...
— Some Christmas Stories • Charles Dickens
... gift of oratory of whose full powers he was himself hardly conscious yet, though destined very soon to become so. He told his story well, without exaggeration, yet with a force of simple appeal that was irresistible. Gradually the great man's face relaxed from its forbidding severity. Interest, warming almost to sympathy, came to be ...
— Scaramouche - A Romance of the French Revolution • Rafael Sabatini
... The romance and exaggeration characteristic of these modes of thinking have gradually worn away in modern times; but much of what was most valuable in them has remained. Love has in later ages never been divested of the tenderness and consideration, which were thus rendered some of its most estimable ...
— Thoughts on Man - His Nature, Productions and Discoveries, Interspersed with - Some Particulars Respecting the Author • William Godwin
... next step. His heart was very sore. The condition of Mile End—those gaunt-eyed women and wasted children, all the sordid details of their unjust avoidable suffering weighed upon his nerves perpetually. But he was conscious that this state of feeling was one of tension, perhaps of exaggeration, and though it was impossible he should let the matter alone, he was anxious to do ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... to suggestion, but in hypnosis this condition is artificially increased. (c) Suggestion explains all. Despite the fact that the members of the Nancy school regard the condition as purely physiological and simply an exaggeration of the normal, they consider it, in its profound stages at all events, a form ...
— The World's Greatest Books - Volume 15 - Science • Various
... at the foot of the tower. Then he went off, I should say, without exaggeration, a ...
— The War Terror • Arthur B. Reeve
... humanity of Jesus and of our ability and duty to become like Him. Spurred by Romanticism's interest in imaginatively reconstructing history, many Lives of Christ have been written; and it is no exaggeration to say that Jesus is far better known and understood at present than He has been since ...
— Some Christian Convictions - A Practical Restatement in Terms of Present-Day Thinking • Henry Sloane Coffin
... little good-humoured exaggeration, he gave Mr. Jeekes a description of his encounter with Mary. And lest it should seem that young Wright was allowing Mr. Jeekes to pump him, it should be stated that Bruce was well aware of one of the secretary's most notable characteristics, a common failing, be it remarked, ...
— The Yellow Streak • Williams, Valentine
... says, "Starr King was the Sanitary Commission of California." This is but slight exaggeration, for King made it his peculiar mission to raise money as rapidly as possible for the suffering soldiers. In the interest of the Commission he traveled to every part of the Coast, and in the face of the greatest ...
— Starr King in California • William Day Simonds
... withholding the elective franchise from men who had fought to destroy the Union, there is no doubt that disabilities and exclusions were imposed upon large classes in certain States of the South. But perhaps even here there have been exaggeration and misunderstanding, for in some of the reconstructed States,—notably Georgia, Florida, and the Carolinas,—there were no test-oaths and no exclusion from the right of suffrage by reason of participation in the rebellion; and yet hostility to the Reconstruction ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Volume 2 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... mean time Mr. Johnsen went on his way. It was quite true that he was going to Sandsgaard, but Delphin's statement that he was there every day was an exaggeration. Since that Sunday, when the conversation had waxed so warm, he had not been at Sandsgaard; but his thoughts had been occupied ever since by the recollection of his last conversation with Rachel ...
— Garman and Worse - A Norwegian Novel • Alexander Lange Kielland
... civilization. The affectation and insincerity of our daily life make such a spectacle fresh and pleasing to us. But we enjoy it because of its unexpectedness, its separateness, its unlikeness to the ordinary course of existence. It is like a huge, strange, gorgeous flower, an exaggeration and intensification of such flowers as we know; but a flower without roots, unique, never to be reproduced. It is fitting that its portrait should be painted; but, once done, it is done with; we cannot fill our picture-gallery with it. Carlyle wrote the History of the French Revolution, ...
— Confessions and Criticisms • Julian Hawthorne
... tale, distorted and diversified a thousand ways by the credulity and exaggeration of the tellers. At first I listened to the story with indifference or mirth. Methought it was confuted by its own extravagance. The enormity and variety of such an evil made it unworthy to be believed. I expected that every new day would detect ...
— Arthur Mervyn - Or, Memoirs of the Year 1793 • Charles Brockden Brown
... a visible white line, but by a shadowed furrow from which they fell in massive ripples to right and left. In these slim days he looked the younger for being rather below the middle size, and though at last one perceived him contracting an indefinable air of self-consciousness, a slight exaggeration of the facial movements, the attitudes, the little tricks, and the romance in shirt-collars, which must be expected from one who, in spite of his knowledge, was so exceedingly young, it was impossible to say that he was making any great ...
— Impressions of Theophrastus Such • George Eliot
... corn on the cob. Matters of clothes for men and women are treated with the same fullness of information and accuracy of taste as are questions of the furnishing of their houses and the training of their minds to social intercourse. But there is no exaggeration of the minor details at the expense of the more important spirit of personal conduct and attitude of mind. To dwell on formal trivialities, the author holds, is like "measuring the letters of the sign-boards by the roadside instead of profiting by the directions they offer." She ...
— Etiquette • Emily Post
... glory of what were known as "store clothes." The Pittsburgh Despatch, which sent out a reporter to the train to interview him as he passed through that city, westward-bound, refers to "the high expanse of white linen which enclosed his neck to the ears," which sounds like a slight exaggeration. Tradition does insist, however, that he wore a derby hat when he arrived, which was considered highly venturesome. Derby hats as a rule were knocked off on sight and then bombarded with six-shooters beyond recognition. ...
— Roosevelt in the Bad Lands • Hermann Hagedorn
... said Mr. Albert Spener with a little exaggeration of his natural stiffness. Perhaps he did not suspect that all the morning he had been manifesting considerable loftiness toward Loretz, and that he spoke in a way that made Leonhard feel that his departure from Spenersberg ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, No. 23, February, 1873, Vol. XI. • Various
... dismissing the subject of the aborigines, I shall touch very briefly on the monuments and antiquities of the west,—with strong convictions that there has been much exaggeration on this subject. I have already intimated that the mounds of the west are natural formations, but I have not room for the circumstances and facts that go to sustain this theory. The number of objects considered as antiquities ...
— A New Guide for Emigrants to the West • J. M. Peck
... say that social classes have never existed in Russia and that the categories which appear in the legislation and in the official statistics are mere administrative fictions, is a piece of gross exaggeration. ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace
... something ludicrous in the notion, that a man whose life had been pacific, and who trembled at the noise of arms, should seek to supersede the terrible Alva, of whom his eulogists asserted, with, Castilian exaggeration, that the very name of fear inspired him with horror. But there was a limit beyond which the influence of Anna de Mendoza and her husband did not extend. Philip was not to be driven to the Netherlands against his will, nor to be prevented from assigning the ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... Georgiana Farrer mentioned on page 190 of her Miscellaneous Poems, 'I am old by sin entangled;' but this was probably a pious exaggeration. Only some one young and intellectually very vigorous could have penned her startling numbers. I suggest that she retained more of her youth than, from religious motives, she thought it proper to admit. In the 'eighties, when incense was burned in drawing-rooms, ...
— Masques & Phases • Robert Ross
... exaggeration, but indeed they slept so soundly that our men, surrounding them, took away most of their weapons before they understood what was going on. Binding their arms, we pushed and dragged them close together, and then the captain placed his men round them in a circle. Sentries were ...
— At the Point of the Sword • Herbert Hayens
... beg you not to use that exceedingly objectionable expression? I ask you a simple question; please answer it without exaggeration. Why do you object to accompany me ...
— Flaming June • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... important ordinance passed by both Houses of the Long Parliament;[80] nor does Hutchinson, or Graham, or Palfrey. Less sweeping acts of authority over the colonies, by either of the Charters, are portrayed by these historians with minuteness and power, if not in terms of exaggeration. The most absolute and comprehensive authority as to both appointments and trade in the colonies ordered by the Long Parliament and Commonwealth are referred to in brief and vague terms, or not at all noticed, by the historical eulogist of the Massachusetts Bay Puritans,[81] who, ...
— The Loyalists of America and Their Times, Vol. 1 of 2 - From 1620-1816 • Egerton Ryerson
... to suffer, even before he is aware, perhaps hopelessly and forever, from the results of that contact. Vague declamation about immorality and vaguer warnings against it have no effect and possess no meaning, while rhetorical exaggeration is unnecessary. A very simple and concise statement of the actual facts concerning the evils that beset life is quite sufficient and adequate, and quite essential. To ignore this need is only possible to those who take a dangerously ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... edifice. I am to-day obliged to watch over the maintenance of public liberty. I have no idea of the French people becoming serfs."—"The prefects are wrong in straining their authority."—"The repose and freedom of citizens should not depend on the exaggeration or arbitrariness of a mere administrator."—"Let authority be felt by the people as little as possible and not bear down on them needlessly."—(Letters of January 15, 1806, March 6, 1807, January 12, 1809, to Fouche, and of March 6, 1807, to ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 5 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 1 (of 2)(Napoleon I.) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... set of sun—in parading the streets of our metropolis: nor will the expense in coach hire, or shoe leather, be the least which you will have to encounter! The prints themselves may cost something! Lest any fastidious and cynical critic should accuse me, and with apparent justice, of gross exaggeration or ignorance in this recipe, I will inform him, on good authority, that a late distinguished and highly respectable female collector, who had commenced an ILLUSTRATED BIBLE, procured not fewer than seven hundred prints for the illustration of the 20th, 21st, 22d, 23d, 24th, and 25th verses ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... like these had no existence in reality, but were made by some kind fairy for extremely good little boys. The marvelous exaggeration of childhood gave this little parti-colored city a respectable development, and I walked through its regular streets, tho with the same precautions as did Gulliver in Liliput. Luebeck gave back to me this ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume V (of X) • Various
... gentlemanly ease and polish, and she had been very proud of having so fine a city brother to introduce to the girls. Imagine her astonishment and chagrin when she saw him standing before Lina with an exaggeration of the agitated, sheepish air the girls made such fun of in their rural admirers! But if that surprised her, what was her amazement to see Lina looking equally confused, and blushing to where her neck curved beneath ...
— Hooking Watermelons - 1898 • Edward Bellamy
... always agreeable, personality of the translator. In his preface[5] Grundtvig remarked that he put nothing into his poem that was not historically and poetically true to the original. The statement can only be regarded as an unfortunate exaggeration. Grundtvig's style cannot be called even a faint reflection of the Beowulf style. He has popularized the story, and he has cheapened it. There is no warrant in the original for the coarse invective of the extract that has just been cited. In the Old English, Hunferth taunts ...
— The Translations of Beowulf - A Critical Biography • Chauncey Brewster Tinker
... metaphors in a curious way, using such a phrase as "holding on like life,"—a mixture of "holding on for his life," and "holding on like grim death." It came from his eager way of putting emphasis into what he was saying. This sometimes gave an air of exaggeration where it was not intended; but it gave, too, a noble air of strong and generous conviction; as, for instance, when he gave his evidence before the Royal Commission on vivisection and came out with his words about cruelty, "It deserves detestation and ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume I • Francis Darwin |
