"Exaggeration" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... 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 the absurdity and fallacy of such representations. ...
— Arthur Mervyn - Or, Memoirs of the Year 1793 • Charles Brockden Brown
... aware how hardly his father was pressed for ready-money; the squire had never spoken to him on the subject without being angry; and many of his loose contradictory statements—all of which, however contradictory they might appear, had their basis in truth—were set down by his son to the exaggeration of passion. But it was uncomfortable enough to a young man of Osborne's age to feel himself continually hampered for want of a five-pound note. The principal supplies for the liberal—almost luxurious table at the Hall, came off the estate; so that there was no appearance of ...
— Wives and Daughters • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... the life of Joan of Arc throughout its short career with something like precision. The sittings of the commissioners took place at Paris, Orleans, Rouen, and also at Domremy. It may be said without exaggeration that the whole of France and all its classes seemed, after an interval of a quarter of a century, to raise its voice in honour of the memory of its martyr Maid, and to attest to the spotless and noble ...
— Joan of Arc • Ronald Sutherland Gower
... importance is the consideration of the influence of Christianity, and of the Church, on the investigation and elimination of disease. In this matter the Church deserves the severest censure. It is no exaggeration to say that she hindered the scientific progress of the world for centuries. She applied to the explanation of the causation of disease, the demon theories inherited from Egypt, Persia, and the East. The Bible itself reflects the views on demonology ...
— Outlines of Greek and Roman Medicine • James Sands Elliott
... corruption but was a "new man" and comparatively without means, he showed himself an upright and indulgent administrator. The statement, that none of the Achaeans perished but Diaeus and none of the Boeotians but Pytheas, is a rhetorical exaggeration: in Chalcis especially sad outrages occurred; but yet on the whole moderation was observed in the infliction of penalties. Mummius rejected the proposal to throw down the statues of Philopoemen, the founder of the Achaean patriotic ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... critic. It is now, however, generally admitted on the one hand that they served in some degree to counteract the rashness of Philanthropy; on the other, that their effect was marred by more than the writer's usual faults of exaggeration. It is needless to refer the temper they display to the troubles then gathering about his domestic life. A better explanation is to be found in the public ...
— Thomas Carlyle - Biography • John Nichol
... in the way of an exaggeration," Will Smith suggested, "but it is the absolute truth, for all that! Men lost among the nigger-heads have been found later on with ...
— The Call of the Beaver Patrol - or, A Break in the Glacier • V. T. Sherman
... of course great exaggeration in all this, for the English had fought desperately enough in her presence except on the one occasion of Patay, notwithstanding all the early prestige of Jeanne. But at all events it was made perfectly clear that the foregoing conclusion must be carried out, and that Jeanne must die: ...
— Jeanne d'Arc - Her Life And Death • Mrs.(Margaret) Oliphant
... qualification, ancient half-truths which to become truly moral need to be squarely faced with their complementary half-truths. The inevitable danger is that the pupil sooner or later grasps the one-sided exaggeration of this teaching, and the credit of the sexual hygienist is gone. Life is an art, and love, which lies at the heart of life, is an art; they are not science; they cannot be converted into clear-cut formulae and taught as the multiplication ...
— The Task of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... 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
... last pure sunsets I ever saw, about the year 1876,—and the point I want you to note in it is, that the air being pure, the smoke on the horizon, though at last it hides the sun, yet hides it through gold and vermilion. Now, don't go away fancying there's any exaggeration in that study. The prismatic colors, I told you, were simply impossible to paint; these, which are transmitted colors, can indeed be suggested, but no more. The brightest pigment we have would look dim ...
— The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century - Two Lectures delivered at the London Institution February - 4th and 11th, 1884 • John Ruskin
... paralysis of voluntary Flaccid paralysis of voluntary muscles. muscles. No marked wasting of paralysed Marked wasting of paralysed muscles. muscles. No reaction of degeneration. Reaction of degeneration. Exaggeration of reflexes. Loss ...
— Manual of Surgery Volume Second: Extremities—Head—Neck. Sixth Edition. • Alexander Miles
... intellectually consequent: and with such a nature struggling in the bands of a narrow teaching, hemmed in by a social life which seemed nothing but a labyrinth of petty courses, a walled-in maze of small paths that led no whither, the outcome was sure to strike others as at once exaggeration and inconsistency. The thing which seemed to her best, she wanted to justify by the completest knowledge; and not to live in a pretended admission of rules which were never acted on. Into this soul-hunger as yet all her youthful passion was poured; the union which attracted her was one that ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... scarcely be an exaggeration to say that more of Apuleius' works have perished than survived. He has told us in the Florida (20) that he has written dialogues, hymns, music, history, and satire. And we have copious references to works from his pen, that, perhaps fortunately, no longer ...
— The Apologia and Florida of Apuleius of Madaura • Lucius Apuleius
... the Eighty Club made a special public appeal for information as to cases of religious intolerance. They received a great many responses to this appeal, but it is hardly any exaggeration to say that they found no genuine cases of religious intolerance outside the North-east corner of Ulster, where they received some conspicuous examples of the religious persecution of Liberal Protestants by their ...
— Home Rule - Second Edition • Harold Spender
... passed pleasantly enough, and I found Harley's heroine to be all that he had told me and a great deal more besides. In fact, so greatly did I enjoy her society that I intentionally prolonged the evening to about three times its normal length—which was a very inartistic bit of exaggeration, I admit; but then I don't pretend to be a realist, and when I sit down to write I can make my evenings as long or as short as I choose. I will say, however, that, long as my evening was, I made it go through its whole length without having recourse to such copy-making subterfuges ...
— A Rebellious Heroine • John Kendrick Bangs
... call virtuous conduct, and which we then—and here comes in the mischief—pretend is our conduct and our thoughts. If the result were that we all believed one another to be better than we really are, there would be something to be said for it; but the actual result appears to be a monstrous exaggeration of the power and continuity of sexual passion. The whole world shares the fate of Lucrezia Borgia, who, though she seems on investigation to have been quite a suitable wife for a modern British Bishop, has been invested by the popular historical imagination with all the extravagances of ...
— Overruled • George Bernard Shaw
... of being extinguished, I would with my own breath rekindle the expiring flame!" And his voice, which sounded like a gale of wind, and his face, red as a furnace, and his enormous fists fiercely clenched, made it appear to the congregation, for the moment, that this terrifying assertion was no exaggeration. But ...
— Notes in North Africa - Being a Guide to the Sportsman and Tourist in Algeria and Tunisia • W. G. Windham
... the spring floods, was stored up to be used when needed. So abundant was the growth of grain on this rich soil that Herodotus did not dare state the amount for fear that he would be thought guilty of exaggeration. ...
— The Two Great Retreats of History • George Grote
... costume with a very long train, a little fur toque to match a small neck piece, and a little sausage-shaped muff. Her diamond earrings were enormous, but not very good stones. Nina's dress was of raspberry cloth, cut in the latest exaggeration of fashion—her skirt was short and skimp as her hat was huge. Her muff of sables as big and soft as a pillow—she could easily have buried her arms in it to the shoulder. The elaborateness of Nina's clothes filled the contessa ...
— The Title Market • Emily Post
... said Christian, in gibing exaggeration. "Larry, you've got awfully English!" Larry rolled over and came into play again, sitting bolt upright; "I'm ...
— Mount Music • E. Oe. Somerville and Martin Ross
... duelling system. I said that the comic characters were not affected by the changes made in America; the change of nationality did affect them to a certain extent. A young girl, Florence St. Vincent, afterward Mrs. Browne, represents, here, with dramatic exaggeration, of course, a type of young girl more or less familiar to all of us. In England she is not a type, but an eccentric personality, with which the audience must be made acquainted by easy stages. It was necessary, therefore, to introduce a number of preliminary ...
— The Autobiography of a Play - Papers on Play-Making, II • Bronson Howard
... of action and his passion for the human form lay the elements of his art most easily lending themselves to exaggeration. That the master did indeed permit himself to be carried beyond due limits in these matters is seen by comparing the grandeur of the Sistine ceiling with the mannerisms of the Last Judgment. The interval between was "the time of his best technical and spiritual creativeness," when ...
— Michelangelo - A Collection Of Fifteen Pictures And A Portrait Of The - Master, With Introduction And Interpretation • Estelle M. Hurll
... Evangels are but allegories, the key of which Saint John gives, in saying that the world might be filled with the books that could be written upon the words and deeds of Jesus Christ; words which, they thought, would be only a ridiculous exaggeration, if he were not speaking of an allegory and a legend, that might be varied and ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... full thirty yards, and have extended the hypotheneuse three hundred and sixty yards under the level road at the summit. If the barbarity of the practice of tight-reining the heads of wretched horses needed any exaggeration, its superlative absurdity was evidenced in the horses which I saw labouring up this hill. Nature, which does nothing in vain, had a final purpose in giving motion to the vertebrae that join the head ...
— A Morning's Walk from London to Kew • Richard Phillips
... confess about the insurrection. He told 'em he didn't know anything about any insurrection. They shot several balls through him, quartered him, and put his head on a pole at the fork of the road leading to the court." (This is no exaggeration, if the Virginia newspapers may be taken as evidence.) "It was there but a short time. He had no trial. They never do. In Nat's time, the patrols would tie up the free colored people, flog 'em, and try to make 'em lie against one another, and often killed them before anybody could interfere. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 46, August, 1861 • Various
... one more effort to check what she considered exaggeration in the mode of life of her daughters-in-law. She urged their husbands to interfere, and by their authority to oblige them to mix more with the world. But Paluzzo and Lorenzo had too deep an esteem for their ...
— The Life of St. Frances of Rome, and Others • Georgiana Fullerton
... the course of Col. T. W. Higginson's life and made him an abolitionist. "As it was the first anti-slavery work ever printed in America in book form, so," says Col. Higginson, "I have always thought it the ablest." Whittier says, "It is no exaggeration to say that no man or woman at that period rendered more substantial service to the cause of freedom, or made such a 'great renunciation' in ...
— Daughters of the Puritans - A Group of Brief Biographies • Seth Curtis Beach
... giraffe, although from sixteen to twenty feet in height, is perfectly defenceless, and can only trust to the swiftness of its pace and the extraordinary power of vision, for its means of protection. The eye of this animal is the most beautiful exaggeration of that of the gazelle, while the color of the reddish-orange hide, mottled with darker spots, changes the tints of the skin with the differing rays of light, according to the muscular movement of the body. No one who has merely seen the giraffe in a cold climate can form the least idea of ...
— In the Heart of Africa • Samuel White Baker
... of Hindenburg is wider than the east—and the west; it permeates the business world and stiffens the economic backbone of the nation. It is no exaggeration to say that the whole German people, barring the inevitable though small percentage of weaklings, is trying with terrific earnestness to live up to the homely Hindenburgian motto, "Durchhalten!" ("Hold out,") or, in more idiomatic ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... in her chair, and generally let the conversation take its own course until it came very chose to her. She had a sober mode of statement and criticism, which was never brilliant and never stupid. It ought to have been most serviceable to her husband, because it might have corrected the exaggeration into which his impulse, talent, and power of pictorial representation were so apt to fall. She had been brought up as an Evangelical, but she had passed through no religious experiences whatever, and religion, in the sense in which Evangelicalism ...
— Catharine Furze • Mark Rutherford
... 'This is no poetical exaggeration. In some of the counties of England, distinguished for archery, shafts of this extraordinary length were actually used. Thus, at the battle of Blackheath, between the troops of Henry VII and the Cornish insurgents, in 1496, the bridge of Dartford was defended by a picked band of archers ...
— Marmion • Sir Walter Scott
... otherwise we would certainly have reported the case to the Phrenological Society. But we no more doubt his existence than that of the spectre of the Brocken. Sometimes the shadowy spectre of Ben Muich Dhui is a gigantic exaggeration of the ordinary human form seen stalking in a line with the traveller's route, striding from mountain-top to mountain-top as he steps from stone to stone, and imitating on an enlarged scale all his gestures. The spectre has an excellent excuse for all ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, No. 382, October 1847 • Various
... Affairs. I am confident that the minority judgment is the better and that it can be more relied upon, because it is strictly in conformity with the entire history of the Isthmian canal project. I am confident that the objections which have been raised against the lock plan are an undue exaggeration of difficulties such as are inherent in every great engineering project, and which, I have not the slightest doubt, will be successfully solved by American engineers, in the light of American experience, exactly as similar difficulties have been solved ...
— The American Type of Isthmian Canal - Speech by Hon. John Fairfield Dryden in the Senate of the - United States, June 14, 1906 • John Fairfield Dryden
... floor. The child picks it up quickly, holds it behind him, and to my question, "Where is the key?" answers nicht mehr da (no longer there). As I found in the following months no falsehood, in the proper sense of the word, to record, but rather that the least error, the most trivial exaggeration, was corrected at once by the child himself, with peculiarly naive seriousness, in a little story, with pauses between the separate words, so, too, in the present case the answer nicht mehr da is no falsehood, but is to be understood as meaning that ...
— The Mind of the Child, Part II • W. Preyer
... submissive piety, have fallen refreshingly into the depths of my heart. But, dear sister-in-law, I must tell you, as well as the others, that you are too liberal towards me in dispensing your esteem and praises, and your exaggeration has cast me back face to face with my inmost judge, who has shown me in the mirror of my conscience the image of my ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - KARL-LUDWIG SAND—1819 • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... no exaggeration: there were four women whom I remember to have seen, who possessed their hair in this profusion; of these, three were English, the other was a Levantine. Their hair was of that length and quantity, that, when let down, it almost entirely shaded the person, so ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... there, yet she offered no assistance, until her mistress bade her attend to my toilet; then she obeyed, searching my face all the while from under her black eyelashes. Yet her singularity was probably an exaggeration of my own fancy, for she seems quiet and well-behaved, though a little sullen. I am glad she is not to be my attendant, for there is certainly an evil look in her eyes, whenever she regards me, and I could never feel quite ...
— Mabel's Mistake • Ann S. Stephens
... seen it passing by in the street what age would she have guessed its owner to be? Something in the thirties; but perhaps in the late thirties? She wasn't quite certain about it. Really it is so difficult to look at yourself quite impartially. And she did not wish to fall into exaggeration, to be hypercritical. She wished to be strictly reasonable, to see herself exactly as she was. The eyes were brilliant, but did they ...
— December Love • Robert Hichens
... meant for an exaggeration, but he was unused to such scenes, and the woman's language more than anything else had helped to scare him from his self-possession. The hour was late already, reckoning by his custom. He washed, and went upstairs, but not to bed. He threw the ...
— Despair's Last Journey • David Christie Murray
... to crown herself. She somehow had got the idea that she was the queen emeritus of the May. It was reported about town afterward that she tried to do the giant swing on the parlor chandelier. But this was a gross exaggeration; she only tried to hang by her legs ...
— One Third Off • Irvin S. Cobb
... sort, the numbers being especially designed to touch the flintiest of hearts, and Henriette was everywhere. No one, great or small, in that vast gathering but received one of her gracious smiles, and it is no exaggeration to say that half of the flowers purchased at rates that would make a Fifth Avenue tailor hang his head in shame, were bought by the gallant gentlemen of Newport for presentation to the hostess of the day. These were immediately placed on sale again so that on the flower ...
— Mrs. Raffles - Being the Adventures of an Amateur Crackswoman • John Kendrick Bangs
... indifferent to the religious changes that had been effected, there were certain political occurrences which they viewed with less equanimity. One of these was the vast number of Spaniards brought over by Philip. It was reckoned— doubtless with some exaggeration—that in September, 1554, three Spaniards might be seen in London to every Englishman. The rumour ran that five thousand more were on the way. The nation was both vexed and alarmed. Was England to be reduced, like the Netherlands, to the condition ...
— For the Master's Sake - A Story of the Days of Queen Mary • Emily Sarah Holt
... seed and of young monsters, etc.), and that making a new plan for the structure of animals was thought, and thought was labour, and therefore God kept to a uniform plan, and left rudiments. This is no exaggeration. In short, God is a man, rather cleverer than us...I am very much obliged for the "Nation" (returned by this post); it is ADMIRABLY good. You say I always guess wrong, but I do not believe any one, except Asa Gray, could have done the thing so well. I would bet even, or three to two, that ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume II • Francis Darwin
... "the British aristocracy was cradled behind city counters" errs on the side of exaggeration, there is no doubt that in the veins of scores of the proudest English peers runs the blood of ancestors who ...
— Love Romances of the Aristocracy • Thornton Hall
... old servant hated the man who had deserted her, Agnes made due allowance for a large infusion of exaggeration in the picture presented to her. The main impression produced on her mind was an impression of nervous uneasiness. If she trusted herself in the streets by daylight while Lord Montbarry remained in London, how could she be ...
— The Haunted Hotel - A Mystery of Modern Venice • Wilkie Collins
... much speaking, and for a time he was. People did not realise that so many confident allegations could be made in which there was no substance at all. They thought themselves safe in making allowance for Freeman's exaggeration, and Freeman simply bored many persons into accepting his estimate of Froude. Perhaps he went a little too far when he claimed to have found inaccuracies in Froude's transcripts from the Simancas manuscripts without ...
— The Life of Froude • Herbert Paul
... Traveller.—That’s an exaggeration; but say that the English really have carried machinery to great perfection; tell the Pasha (he’ll be struck with that) that whenever we have any disturbances to put down, even at two or three hundred miles from London, we can ...
— Eothen • A. W. Kinglake
... Lord: at the blasting of the breath of thy displeasure. He shall send down from on high to fetch me: and shall take me out of many waters.' What protects such words from the imputation of mere Eastern exaggeration? The firm conviction that God is the deliverer, not only of David, but of all who trust in God; that the whole majesty of God, and all the powers of nature, are arrayed on the side of the good and of the oppressed. 'The Lord shall reward me after my righteous dealing: according ...
— David • Charles Kingsley
... the Kantian ideal of truth and virtue. This stanza and the next embody, perhaps with some exaggeration, the ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... above characterised the captain as "surly," the mate "brutal," and the crew a set of "ruffians": I have spoken without exaggeration. With an exception or two, a more villainous gang I never encountered—of course not before that time—for that was not likely; but never since either, and it has several times been the fortune of my life to mix in ...
— Ran Away to Sea • Mayne Reid
... half of the eighteenth century there were two centres of liberal ideas on the continent of Europe: France and Poland. On an impartial survey one may say without exaggeration that then France was relatively every bit as weak as Poland; even, perhaps, more so. But France's geographical position made her much less vulnerable. She had no powerful neighbours on her frontier; a decayed Spain in the south and a conglomeration of small ...
— Notes on Life and Letters • Joseph Conrad
... illustration, and enough of the salt of pleasantry and sarcasm to flavour and in some degree disguise a somewhat declamatory and pretentious dogmatism. It may seem too epigrammatic, but it is, in our serious judgment, strictly true, to say that his History seems to be a kind of combination and exaggeration of the peculiarities of all his former efforts. It is as full of political prejudice and partisan advocacy as any of his parliamentary speeches. It makes the facts of English History as fabulous as his Lays do those of Roman tradition; and it is ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... cannot get the projection of things sufficiently shown; but never mind that; there is no need that they should appear to project, but great need that their relations of shade to each other should be preserved. All deceptive projection is obtained by partial exaggeration of shadow; and whenever you see it, you may be sure the drawing is more or less bad: a thoroughly fine drawing or painting will always show a ...
— The Elements of Drawing - In Three Letters to Beginners • John Ruskin
... is simply that of mounted infantry. Things are better now than they were; a Federal cavalryman can at least sit saddle-fast, to receive and return a sabre-cut; there have been some sharp skirmishes of late, and, allowing for exaggeration, Averill's encounter with Fitzhugh Lee brought out real work ...
— Border and Bastille • George A. Lawrence
... Indian Renaissance! What comparison, for example, can be made between the stimulus of the new learning of the sixteenth century and the stimulus of the first introduction to a modern library? It would be an exaggeration to say that the Indian mind is now showing all its power in response to the stimulus. But it is everywhere active, and in some spheres, as in Religion and Philanthropy, in History, in Archaeology, in Law, in certain Natural Sciences, individuals have already ...
— New Ideas in India During the Nineteenth Century - A Study of Social, Political, and Religious Developments • John Morrison
... bringing it before Parliament, and I dare say would have done it, only they hadn't time to come to me, and I hadn't power to go to them, and they got tired of my long letters, and dropped the business. And this is God's truth, without one word of suppression or exaggeration, as fifty people, both in this place and out ...
— The Pickwick Papers • Charles Dickens
... religion, quoted by Porphyry. This is important for it shows that he turned towards India for truth, but though his teaching included the pre-existence of the soul and some doctrine of Karma, it was not specially impregnated with Indian ideas. This, however, may be said without exaggeration of Carpocrates and Basilides who both taught at Alexandria about 120-130 A.D. Unfortunately we know the views of these interesting men only from the accounts of their opponents. Carpocrates[1134] is said to have claimed the ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, An Historical Sketch, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Charles Eliot
... "I didn't use any sweet ile on the job, that's sartin. If he said I pounded it in with a club 'twouldn't have been much exaggeration." ...
— Shavings • Joseph C. Lincoln
... had lost, within three weeks, two aunts, three grandfathers, and five grandmothers—which, considering that an actual count proved the house of bereavement still able to boast of seventeen occupants, was plainly an exaggeration. ...
— Americans All - Stories of American Life of To-Day • Various
... scabbard of his sword, he bowed until the stiff little queue of his curled wig pointed straight at the heavy cornice. The ladies swept the floor with their graceful courtesies, that of the younger presenting the least touch of exaggeration as with folded arms and downcast eyes she sank backward before her guest. Another knock was heard, and when the names of three more of the garrison officers were announced, Miss Elliott whispered to Billy ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. XVII, No. 99, March, 1876 • Various
... story too long, I may briefly say that after making due allowance for the natural exaggeration of the owner, the run on Lake Wanaka's shores seemed certainly to offer many attractions. Besides thousands of acres of beautiful sheltered sheep country, it was said to possess a magnificent bush, in which sawyers were already hard at work. Of course all this timber would become our ...
— Station Amusements • Lady Barker
... tendency to exaggeration in conversation, and he gave a striking illustration of this in a story that he related one day when I called at his house. Fogg was telling me about an incident that occurred in a neighboring town a few days before, and this is the way he ...
— Elbow-Room - A Novel Without a Plot • Charles Heber Clark (AKA Max Adeler)
... Haydn (1782-1809) we are face to face with a musician of a different type. Haydn is popularly known as the father of the Sonata, the Symphony and the String-Quartet; but, according to Edward Dickinson,[106] this estimate is something of an exaggeration, for "it overlooks the fact that a large number of composers were struggling with the same problem and working along similar lines. Haydn was simply the greatest in genius of the instrumental writers of his day. His works have ...
— Music: An Art and a Language • Walter Raymond Spalding
... a string of adventures of that hardy and romantic individual. How much in Smith's extant narrations is exaggeration, how much is dispossession of others' merits in favor of his own, it is difficult now to say.* A thing that one little likes is his persistent depreciation of his fellows. There is but one Noble Adventurer, and that one is John Smith. ...
— Pioneers of the Old South - A Chronicle of English Colonial Beginnings, Volume 5 In - The Chronicles Of America Series • Mary Johnston
... and has to spin out commonplaces in rich language. One feels this even in the "Idylls of the King," which are the best of his later or middle long efforts: they are artificial, not impulsive; Virgil, not Homer; Meredith calls them 'dandiacal flutings,' which is an exaggeration. But I can quite see how irritating Tennyson must be to ardent sceptics like Meredith and the school which is now in the ascendant. To them a poet is essentially a rebel, and Tennyson refused to be a rebel. That is why they can't ...
— Letters from Mesopotamia • Robert Palmer
... lie. She gleaned scraps of a conversation, and allowed a vivid imagination to supply the portions she did not hear. Add to this the love of producing a sensation, which is an inherent trait of many characters, and behold potent reasons for seven-tenths of the cases of exaggeration which come to our notice, romances constructed upon the "impressionist-picture" plan—a thing of splash and glare and abnormal perspective that vitiates the taste for symmetry and ...
— The Secret of a Happy Home (1896) • Marion Harland
... with him to the Mediterranean, and there speedily made his mark, being transferred from admiral to admiral with ever-growing tokens of reliance. Despite the lapse of time, and the long interval of peace, it is no exaggeration to say that there is a direct connection of cause and effect between his transfer to Hood's fleet, in the harbor of New York, and the battle of Cape St. Vincent, in 1797, when he emerged from merely professional distinction to national ...
— The Life of Nelson, Vol. I (of 2) - The Embodiment of the Sea Power of Great Britain • A. T. (Alfred Thayer) Mahan
... pricked him slightly on account of the exaggeration in which he had mischievously indulged, but he told himself that Roger would be far better off in the city and his mother's consent would make his going much less difficult. He also realised that if Roger were there to amuse Barbara, Eloise might ...
— Flower of the Dusk • Myrtle Reed
... 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 ...
— The Loyalists of America and Their Times, Vol. 1 of 2 - From 1620-1816 • Egerton Ryerson
... characteristic; and, thirdly, by means of it and of other things, in raising the pitch of interest in his readers to an infinitely higher degree than had ever been known before. The dithyrambs of Diderot are, though not ridiculously, amusingly excessive: but they are only an exaggeration of the truth. On the comic side he was weak: and he made a most unfortunate mistake by throwing this part of the business on young ladies of position and (as he thought) of charm—Miss Darnford, Miss Howe, ...
— The English Novel • George Saintsbury
... though realizing that Henderson Blake was not a man given to exaggeration. Nor did their scepticism altogether vanish when Kendrick had ended his bizarre story with a demonstration of ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, August 1930 • Various
... of truth and accuracy compelled him to make this admission: "It has been generally circulated and believed that he (Goldsmith) was a mere fool in conversation; but, in truth, this has been greatly exaggerated." On this exaggeration—seeing that the contributor to the British Magazine and the Public Ledger was now becoming better known among his fellow authors—a word or two may fitly be said here. It pleased Goldsmith's contemporaries, ...
— Goldsmith - English Men of Letters Series • William Black
... Bessie in the very depths of her trouble, and with her face pale and eyes so heavy with her last night's vigil—what gift that helped her to be gay? Apparently not with an effort, not forced, she was as joyous and frank as her sunniest self. No exaggeration of laughter or fun, but the brightness of her every-day manner, teasing and sparkling round Aunt Sloman, coquetting very naturally with me. It was a swift change from the gloomy atmosphere we had left behind in the parlor, and I basked in it delighted, and feeling, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII, No. 29. August, 1873. • Various
... conscious that there was some exaggeration in this fancy of hers, for she certainly did not wish to share it with Ralph. To him, she supposed, Mary Datchet, composing leaflets for Cabinet Ministers among her typewriters, represented all that was interesting and ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf
... tell when Mary is at home by a perpetual banging of doors,' said Lesbia, which was a sisterly exaggeration founded upon fact, for Molly was given to impetuous rushing in and out of rooms when that eager spirit of hers impelled the light lithe body upon some new expedition. Nor is the society of fox-terriers conducive to repose or stateliness of ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... of poetry, and that, as a prophet of his own had laid it down, poetry should "transport" not "fix." At any rate, it is clear to any one who reads the book that the author was in a mood of deliberate provocation and exaggeration—not a favourable mood for art. The quiet grace of Sophocles is perhaps impossible to reproduce in English, but Mr Arnold's verse is more than quiet, it is positively tame. The dreary tirades of Polyphontes and Merope, and ...
— Matthew Arnold • George Saintsbury
... that "an Englishman's house in India is not his castle, but a thousand better things—a casual ward, a convalescent home, a rest-house for the strayed traveller; and he himself is the steward of it merely." That this is no exaggeration but simple fact, Quita had already seen; and now, when she herself was called upon to obey the unwritten law of her husband's country and service, Lenox noted, with a throb of pride, that for all her artist's ...
— The Great Amulet • Maud Diver
... defects which take root only in masterpieces; it is given only to certain geniuses to have certain defects. Shakespeare is blamed for his abuse of metaphysics, of wit, of redundant scenes, of obscenities, for his employment of the mythological nonsense in vogue in his time, for exaggeration, obscurity, bad taste, bombast, asperities of style. The oak, that giant tree which we were comparing to Shakespeare just now, and which has more than one point of resemblance to him, the oak has an unusual ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... whose course of life ran from 1775 to 1864, in his old age confessed, "I never did a single wise thing in the whole course of my existence, although I have written many which have been thought so." This is the exaggeration of an old man who has been impressed by the frailty of human endeavor. Nevertheless, Landor is a striking illustration of the artistic temperament. He was impractical. Landor could not make a good fist. Even when angry, a frame of mind in which he found himself very frequently, he did not clench ...
— Stories of Authors, British and American • Edwin Watts Chubb
... Elphinstone dared not tax his colleague with exaggeration. In fact, the question was that of sending to the moon a projectile weighing 20,000 lbs., and of giving it an initial force of 2000 yards a second. A moment of silence, therefore, followed the triple proposition made ...
— The Moon-Voyage • Jules Verne
... countenances. In that of Rivers, linked with the hideousness that his wound conferred upon it, he noted the more wicked workings of a spirit, the fell character of whose features received no moderate exaggeration from the dim and flickering glare of the lamp which his hand unsteadily carried. The whole face had in it something awfully fearful. He seemed, in its expression, already striking the blow at the breast of his victim, or rioting with a fiendish revenge in his groaned agonies. ...
— Guy Rivers: A Tale of Georgia • William Gilmore Simms
... keeping, in secret places at Richmond," is said to have amounted to near 1,800,000 l., which, according to our former conjectures, would be equivalent to about 16,000,000 l.; an amount of specie so immense as to warrant a suspicion of exaggeration, in an age when there was no control from public documents on a matter of which the writers of history were ignorant. Our doubts of the amount amassed by Henry are considerably warranted by the computation ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 17, - Issue 495, June 25, 1831 • Various
... with him," he reflected. "Wouldn't mind a taste of that life myself. Up early, work all over by eleven o'clock, nothing to do but loaf about all day until milking time." Which he knew was an exaggeration, but he wanted ...
— In a German Pension • Katherine Mansfield
... the case came before the Inquisition of Valladolid, though the sittings of the court were held in Salamanca. The delator would appear to have been a Jeromite, Fray Joan de Santa Cruz, who took objection to some sixteen propositions which, as he alleged, were put forward by Luis de Leon.[223] Some exaggeration on the part of Santa Cruz is conceivable. As a Jeromite, he bore a grudge against Luis de Leon for his overt opposition to the candidature of Hector Pinto at Salamanca University and, as Francisco de Palacios deposed at Valladolid on February 5, 1573, Santa Cruz had been somewhat excited ...
— Fray Luis de Leon - A Biographical Fragment • James Fitzmaurice-Kelly
... sentiment was perhaps an exaggeration; still I could not but feel a certain sympathy with its humanity. It was an error in a good direction. If an insanity, it was better than the cold, heartless sanity of most men. By the time, therefore, that Booth was ready to speak, I ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 47, September, 1861 • Various
... Aliscans is rather lyrical in its effect, reiterating and reinforcing the heroic motives, making an impression by repetition of one and the same mood; a poem of the glorification of France. It shows, at the same time, how this motive might be degraded by exaggeration and amplification. There are too many Moors in it (as also in Roland), and the sequel is reckless and extravagant, where William of Orange rides to the king's court for help and discovers an ally in the ...
— Epic and Romance - Essays on Medieval Literature • W. P. Ker
... Neapolitans is just ahead. The moon shines brightly on its high-perched castle, and we have scarce stopped the paddles, when our deck is invaded by a new freightage of passengers, already far too many. Twenty boats full of noise and animation, with all the exaggeration that attends both in these latitudes; every pair of oars fighting for a fare, and knocking one another over board in contention for passenger or parcel destined to land at Pizzo. They ship about with the wildness and alacrity of South-Sea islanders; ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 363, January, 1846 • Various
... Emperor; after which a grand morning reception was held as was the custom at the Tuileries, and a review, at which the Emperor inspected a part of his guard, several regiments, and the Saxon troops, who were invited to dine by the French troops. On that day the city of Dresden without much exaggeration might have been compared to a great dining-hall. In fact, while his Majesty was dining in state at the palace of the King of Saxony, where the whole family of this prince was assembled, the entire diplomatic corps was ...
— The Private Life of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Constant
... one side of Negro character, and that side is terribly exaggerated. But all strong natures like hers are given to exaggeration. Wendell Phillips never tells the truth, and yet he always tells the truth. He is a man of strong convictions, and always pronounces his conviction strongly. He has a poetical nature, is a word-painter, and, therefore, indulges in ...
— History of the Negro Race in America from 1619 to 1880. Vol. 2 (of 2) - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George Washington Williams
... appear to the undersigned to be by any means so material as they seem to have been considered by the Government of the United States. The British military detachment stationed at Lake Temiscouata, which the agents employed by the State of Maine had, in the first instance with singular exaggeration represented as amounting to two regiments, is now discovered by the same parties to amount to 175 men, which instead of two regiments is something less than two companies. It is indeed true, should such a point ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 2 (of 2) of Volume 3: Martin Van Buren • James D. Richardson
... imitation, it frequently reminds us—we mean 'The Initials.' The characters portrayed in 'Pique' develop themselves through the means of spirited conversations, arising from the surrounding circumstances—conversations always natural and without exaggeration. The pages are never dull, the story being varied and full of interest. It is a tale of the affections, of the home circle, of jealousies, misconceptions, perversions, feelings, the incidents growing naturally out of the defects and excellences of the individuals depicted. ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol IV, Issue VI, December 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... savagery and hopeless abject misery which we witnessed. They are painted in my mother's book, and should any reader ever refer to those pages for a picture of the state of things among the factory hands at that time, he may take with him my testimony to the fact that there was no exaggeration in the outlines of the picture given. What we are there described to have ...
— What I Remember, Volume 2 • Thomas Adolphus Trollope
... which impels me to describe a bunch of grapes I saw in this vineyard. I must beg my readers to free me from any taint of the spirit of the renowned Baron Munchausen, whose intensely magnifying vision threw its impress upon all objects, but, without the faintest degree of exaggeration, I can say, that while I am no Lilliputian in size, I stood, holding with great difficulty, the weight of a single bunch of grapes in my extended hand, while the other end of it rested upon the ground, nor would I dare to tell this grape story unless ...
— The World As I Have Found It - Sequel to Incidents in the Life of a Blind Girl • Mary L. Day Arms
... with a trembling voice, and yet the most conscientious anxiety to avoid exaggeration in what she was about to say, "that a body of rioters has attacked Mr. Moore's mill to-night. We heard the firing and confusion very plainly here; we none of us slept. It was a sad night. The house has been in great bustle all the morning with people ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... fatal symbol flies, etc. "The description of the starting of the Fiery Cross bears more marks of labor than most of Mr. Scott's poetry, and borders, perhaps, on straining and exaggeration; yet it shows great ...
— The Lady of the Lake • Sir Walter Scott
... exaggeration. We once visited the island of Santorin, which has a population of 9000 souls, who own 46 vessels of 200 tons and upwards, besides many smaller craft. King Otho was sailing about in one steamer at the time, and another was acting the man-of-war amidst a fleet of English, French, Prussian, and ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 54, No. 335, September 1843 • Various
... muscles. The short flexor of the toes of the Gorilla differs from that of Man by the circumstance that one slip of the muscle is attached, not to the heel bone, but to the tendons of the long flexors. The lower Apes depart from the Gorilla by an exaggeration of the same character, two, three, or more, slips becoming fixed to the long flexor tendons—or by a multiplication of the slips.—Again, the Gorilla differs slightly from Man in the mode of interlacing of the long flexor tendons: and the lower ...
— Lectures and Essays • T.H. Huxley
... that He has offered more than He can give? Have not we tested Him in each of these particulars, and do not we, who have come to Him by faith, know that in no one item has He been guilty of exaggeration? We were dead, but behold, we live! We spent our energies in profitless work; but now we bear fruit unto God. We were lonely and isolated, but now have come to the heavenly Jerusalem, to the innumerable company of angels, and to the Church of the Firstborn. Our prayers were aimless and ineffective; ...
— Love to the Uttermost - Expositions of John XIII.-XXI. • F. B. Meyer
... do. Your advertisement is very cleverly worded, my dear sir; only it's like the rest of them, rather too clever. It is so difficult for a clever man not to be too clever. The prevailing weakness of the human intellect seems to me to be exaggeration. However, as I haven't a five-pound note in the world, or the chance of getting one, I'll wish you good ...
— Birds of Prey • M. E. Braddon
... now how very little exaggeration there was in these calculations, although at that time they appeared most wonderful. It is interesting to read of the growth of this industry, and the impression produced by it, in its earlier ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part 2. The Great Navigators of the Eighteenth Century • Jules Verne
... was treated with great respect by her fellow-paupers. I could not help thinking, from a few criticisable peculiarities in her talk and manner, that there might have been a mistake on the governor's part, and perhaps a venial exaggeration on the old lady's, concerning her former position in society; but what struck me was the forcible instance of that most prevalent of English vanities, the pretension to aristocratic connection, on one side, and the submission and reverence with which ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. July, 1863, No. LXIX. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... not with satisfaction, from this very Viennese orchestra. The necessity for such an eccentric exertion arose in consequence of the main tempo having been hurried too much during the progress of the piece; the final result was simply an exaggeration—and moreover, a risk to which no true work of art should be exposed—though, in a rough way, it may ...
— On Conducting (Ueber das Dirigiren): - A Treatise on Style in the Execution of Classical Music • Richard Wagner (translated by Edward Dannreuther)
... inference may be drawn fairly, and without harshness or exaggeration, that the "changed man" had been in times past negligent of some important branches of moral duty; vehement, hasty, and impetuous in his general proceedings; and not considering in his pursuits their fitness ...
— Henry of Monmouth, Volume 1 - Memoirs of Henry the Fifth • J. Endell Tyler
... 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 ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. II • Vernon Lee
... exaggeration. To have debts is to have something. They stir you. They stirred him. Besides there was Cassy. To provide for both was the violin which in his hands played itself. For years it sufficed. Then, with extreme good sense, he fought with ...
— The Paliser case • Edgar Saltus
... United States Commissioner of Patents in 1858, "probably has ever been so harassed, so trampled upon, so plundered by that sordid and licentious class of infringers known in the parlance of the world, with no exaggeration of phrase as 'pirates.' The spoliation of their incessant guerilla upon his defenseless rights ...
— History of the Great American Fortunes, Vol. I - Conditions in Settlement and Colonial Times • Myers Gustavus
... that this complaint is greatly an exaggeration. It is certain that many are blamed while comparatively few are guilty. It is quite possible to be too much disturbed and alarmed by criticisms of the Church and her preachers. These criticisms do not all come from the sincerest friendliness; neither ...
— The Message and the Man: - Some Essentials of Effective Preaching • J. Dodd Jackson
... introduces a false taste into composition. Its language is made up of hyperbolical commonplaces,—offensive from their triteness,—still more offensive from their extravagance. In no school is the trick of overstepping the modesty of nature so speedily acquired. The writer, accustomed to find exaggeration acceptable and necessary on one subject, uses it on all. It is not strange, therefore, that the early panegyrical verses of Dryden should be made up of meanness and bombast. They abound with the conceits which his immediate predecessors had brought into fashion. But his language and ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 2 (of 4) - Contributions To The Edinburgh Review • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... Then, as wolves attacked him, he took refuge in one of the lower halls of Gazeau Tower, which he furnished luxuriously with a bed of moss, and some stumps of trees; wild roots, wild fruit, and goat's milk constituted a daily fare very little inferior to what he had had in the village. This is no exaggeration. You have to see the peasants in certain parts of Varenne to form an idea of the frugal diet on which a man can live and keep in good health. In the midst of these men of stoical habits all round him, Patience was still exceptional. Never had wine ...
— Mauprat • George Sand
... reappeared in Paris, greatly strengthened and ripened by his hermit-existence in the heart of Provence. He produced one masterpiece after another. He had studied with laughter and joy the mirthful side of southern exaggeration, and he created a figure in which its peculiar qualities should be displayed, as it were, in excelsis. This study resulted, in 1872, in "The Prodigious Feats of Tartarin of Tarascon," one of the most purely delightful works of humour in the French language. Alphonse Daudet now, armed with ...
— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet
... Syracusans sent to Sparta and the Italian Greek cities for aid. Agrigentum was most in danger, and most alarmed of the Greek Sicilian cities. It was second only to Syracuse in numbers and wealth, having a population of eight hundred thousand people, though this is probably an exaggeration. It was rich in temples and villas and palaces; its citizens were wealthy, luxurious, ...
— Ancient States and Empires • John Lord
... modern Quietists(1031) were guilty of exaggeration when they taught that grace transforms the human soul into the substance of the Godhead, thus completely merging the creature in its Creator. This contention(1032) leads to Pantheism. How can the soul ...
— Grace, Actual and Habitual • Joseph Pohle
... sportive ideal of human nature in the Old Comedy I have already shown. Now as the New Comedy had to give to its representation a resemblance to a definite reality, it could not indulge in such studied and arbitrary exaggeration as the old did. It was, therefore, obliged to seek for other sources of comic amusement, which lie nearer the province of earnestness, and these it found in a more accurate and thorough ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... out—lines which any may read and none may forget. Tony Cornish had seen them before—on the face of an old dandy coming down the steps of a St. James's Street club. The malgamiter had likewise known drink long and intimately, and it is no exaggeration to say that he had stood cheek by jowl with death ...
— Roden's Corner • Henry Seton Merriman
... dramatic genius may incarnate itself in a hundred shapes, yet in each it will speak what it feels to be the truth. If you are imaginatively representing the feelings of another, as in some playful exaggeration or some dramatic personation, the truth required of you is imaginative truth, not your personal views and feelings. But when you write in your own person you must be rigidly veracious, neither pretending to ...
— The Principles of Success in Literature • George Henry Lewes
... it,' cried Louisa, bouncing on her chair with the exaggeration of one who is indignant with a beloved. 'It is only lately you would even submit to muting your violin. At one time you would have refused flatly, and no ...
— The Trespasser • D.H. Lawrence
... hour of Kearney street I could raise a dozen men for any wild adventure, from pulling down a statue to searching for the Cocos Island treasure." This is hardly an exaggeration, it was the Rialto of the desperate, ...
— The City That Was - A Requiem of Old San Francisco • Will Irwin
... which I read regularly, as well as Blackwood's Magazine. We got them in the American editions in payment for printing the publisher's prospectus, and their arrival was an excitement, a joy, and a satisfaction with me, which I could not now describe without having to accuse myself of exaggeration. The love of literature, and the hope of doing something in it, had become my life to the exclusion of all other interests, or it was at least the great reality, and all other things were as shadows. I was living in a time of high political tumult, ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... with. I may say: If the New. England cup is dangerously sweet, there are here in Old England whole antiseptic floods of good hop-decoction; therein let it mingle; work wholesomely towards what clear benefit it can. Your young ones too, as all exaggeration is transient, and exaggerated love almost itself a blessing, will get through it without damage. As for Fraser, however, the idea of a new Edition is frightful to him; or rather ludicrous, unimaginable. Of him no man has inquired for a Sartor: in his whole wonderful world of Tory Pamphleteers, ...
— The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, - 1834-1872, Vol. I • Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... party obtaining a decisive advantage. Notwithstanding his inferiority in numbers Ieyasu was completely victorious. The carnage was dreadful. The number of the confederate army said to have been killed was 40,000.(195) This seems like an impossible exaggeration, and the Japanese annalists are, like those of other nations, given to heightened statements. But that the loss of life on both sides was very great there can ...
— Japan • David Murray
... living for the last week and wherein I was to live for another week, I fell on my knees in a state of exaltation and offered up to God my mother's sorrow. "You saw, O Lord God, that mamma cried, and that it did not affect me!" Poor child that I was, I imagined in my wild exaggeration of everything that what was expected from me was the renunciation of ...
— My Double Life - The Memoirs of Sarah Bernhardt • Sarah Bernhardt
... Two arose from their bed the next morning in great spirits. Mr Coe had told both his wife and Mimi that the hour of departure from Rottingdean would be six o'clock. But this was an exaggeration. So far as his wife was concerned he had already found it well to exaggerate on such matters. A little judicious exaggeration lessened the risk of missing trains and other phenomena which cannot be missed without ...
— The Matador of the Five Towns and Other Stories • Arnold Bennett
... sermons is of a different stamp from the generality of those which come under our notice. There is a vigour of thought and language throughout, without the slightest extravagance or exaggeration. There is no far-fetched strain of reasoning, nor any attempt at fine writing in these discourses; but the mind of the reader is directed, by a well-managed series of divisions, to the principal doctrines and duties derivable from the passages under consideration. These sermons will afford ...
— Notes & Queries 1850.01.26 • Various
... the artist was accused, existed. But Mr. Henry James sees in du Maurier's ugly people a real specification of type, where we confess that we have felt that his "ferocity" missed the point of resemblance to type through clumsy exaggeration. One noticeable instance, however, to our mind, where the too frequent outrageousness is replaced by an exquisite study of character, is in the face of the fair authoress who, when the gallant Colonel, anxious to break the ice, and ...
— George Du Maurier, the Satirist of the Victorians • T. Martin Wood
... degree to depreciate. But the true way to get it is, by deep communion with the living God, to realise the personality of Jesus Christ as present with us, our Friend, our Saviour, our Sanctifier by His Holy Spirit. Why, Paul's Gospel was, I was going to say, altogether—that would be an exaggeration—but it was to a very large extent simply the generalisation of his own experience. That is what all of us will find to be the Gospel that we have to preach. 'We speak that we do know and testify that ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: Romans Corinthians (To II Corinthians, Chap. V) • Alexander Maclaren
... was the sweetest disposition.—His mother had heart disease but was very gentle and resigned, and a wonderful ratter." —[** As impossible and exasperating as this conversation may sound to a person who is not an idiot, it is scarcely in any respect an exaggeration of one which one of us actually listened to in an American drawing room —otherwise we could not venture to put such a chapter into a book which, professes to ...
— The Gilded Age, Part 4. • Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) and Charles Dudley Warner
... there was probably some foundation for this report, there are many things about it which would seem to indicate that its authors were guilty of gross exaggeration. In the first place it should be noted that though it is headed "The Council of Ireland to Cromwell," it is signed only by Browne, Alen, Brabazon, and Aylmer, the sworn enemies of the Deputy, and the very men who had denounced him for magnifying his success in the previous year. Secondly, ...
— History of the Catholic Church from the Renaissance • Rev. James MacCaffrey
... success has often the knack of fulfilling itself. But the world does not know our secret, and our secret is that our humble faith brings into the field the reserves with the Captain of our salvation at their head. Therefore a self-distrusting Christian can say, and say without exaggeration or presumption, 'I can do all things in Christ, strengthening ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. John Chapters I to XIV • Alexander Maclaren
... Horn, the St. Elmo's fire, the scurvy of the crew and the small matters like the painting of the vessel, to the final sail up Boston Harbor, confirms my father's record. His former shipmate, the late B. G. Stimson, a distinguished citizen of Detroit, said the account of the flogging was far from an exaggeration, and Captain Faucon of the Alert also during his lifetime frequently confirmed all that came under his observation. Such truth in the author demands truth in illustration, and I have cooperated with the publishers in securing a painting of the Alert under full ...
— Two Years Before the Mast • Richard Henry Dana
... exaggerations from which a careful study of the Oriental religions would doubtless save us, says, "There is one against which we are almost unwilling to say a word. I mean the exaggeration of those who, in a deep devotion to the truth as it is in Christ Jesus, count themselves bound, by their allegiance to Him, to take up a hostile attitude to everything not distinctly and avowedly Christian, as though any other position were a treachery to his cause, and a surrender of his ...
— Oriental Religions and Christianity • Frank F. Ellinwood
... sway illimitable: but let them become sensitive to the refinements of taste, and quick in the capacities of pleasure, and that instant the fingers that had grasped the iron rod, fail from the golden scepter. You cannot charge me with any exaggeration in this matter; it is impossible to state the truth too strongly, or as too universal. Forever you will see the rude and simple nation at once more virtuous and more victorious than one practiced in the arts. Watch how the Lydian is overthrown by ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... British accounts develop the transaction into an act of wholesale treachery; Mandubratius (whose name they discover to mean The Black Traitor) deserting, in the thick of a fight, to Caesar, at the head of twenty thousand clansmen,—an absurd exaggeration which may yet have the ...
— Early Britain—Roman Britain • Edward Conybeare
... the square to which it leads), and skirting the Montburon Garden, I reached the Place du Bastion. This is a semicircle now used as the town marketplace. In the midst stands the statue of Bichat by David d'Angers. Bichat, in a frockcoat—why that exaggeration of realism?—stands with his hand upon the heart of a child about nine or ten years old, perfectly nude—why that excess of ideality? Extended at Bichat's feet lies a dead body. It is Bichat's book "Of Life and of Death" translated into ...
— The Companions of Jehu • Alexandre Dumas, pere
... this report, which proved to be a gross exaggeration, the Spanish Junta appointed the Duke of Orleans to a command destined to act on the frontiers of Catalonia. But the local juntas were opposed to the movement. There was no harmony—no combined action. All was confusion, ...
— Louis Philippe - Makers of History Series • John S. C. (John Stevens Cabot) Abbott
... and resentment rising in her at this misrepresentation of the distance to Haig's ranch. Whatever Haig had done, this was cowardly and unfair. She looked eagerly at the other men, expecting to hear some one correct the gross exaggeration. But the faces were all blank, and ...
— The Heart of Thunder Mountain • Edfrid A. Bingham
... such urgent necessity of setting promptly, vigorously and clearly before the people the great and new principles which this crisis is bringing to life. So vast are the issues involved, so tremendous their inevitable consequences, that we acquit of exaggeration the statesman who, in comparing even the gradual unfolding of the mighty past with this our present, exclaimed, 'Now is the first of the ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I. February, 1862, No. II. - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... record as this seems rather like the exaggeration of a diseased fancy, seeking to pander to a corrupt public taste which feeds greedily upon horrors; but, unfortunately, it is derived from the register of high courts of justice, from diplomatic correspondence, and from the confessions, ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... romance and exaggeration, we come to the kernel of the story—that Avary did fall in with an Indian vessel laden with great treasure (and possibly with the Mogul's daughter), which he captured, and thereby ...
— Howard Pyle's Book of Pirates • Howard I. Pyle
... It is no exaggeration to say, that perhaps half the tribesmen who attacked the Malakand, had thought that the soldiers there, were the only troops that the Sirkar [The Government] possessed. "Kill these," they said, "and all is done." What did they know of the distant regiments which the telegraph wires were drawing, ...
— The Story of the Malakand Field Force • Sir Winston S. Churchill
... men who read the foregoing remarks, and in which there is not the least exaggeration or departure from the truth, will imagine, doubtless, that the modern ecclesiastical authorities of the peninsula have, at least, attempted to rectify all that is absurd and irreverent in those practices, and to strip a ceremony so august and imposing as ...
— Roman Catholicism in Spain • Anonymous
... Western men; their off-hand manner makes you at once at your ease with them: they abound in anecdote growing out of the state in which they live, full of wild frolic and hardy adventure, and they recount these adventures with an exaggeration of figure quite Oriental, in a phraseology peculiar to themselves, and with a manner ...
— Impressions of America - During the years 1833, 1834 and 1835. In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Tyrone Power
... The exaggeration of the severity of Bunyan's imprisonment long current, now that the facts are better known, has led, by a very intelligible reaction, to an undue depreciation of it. Mr. Froude thinks that his incarceration ...
— The Life of John Bunyan • Edmund Venables
... 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
... of shot between wind and water, [Footnote: Captain Hilyar's letter. James says the Phoebe had 7 shot between wind and water, and one below the water-line. Porter says she had 18 12-pound shot below the water-line. The latter statement must have been an exaggeration; and James is probably farther wrong still] and was thus a good deal crippled, began to drift slowly to leeward. It was hoped that she would drift out of gun-shot, but this last chance was lost by the parting of the hawser, which left the ...
— The Naval War of 1812 • Theodore Roosevelt
... first, taken an active part in the movement of the legitimated bastards; this province, which had given pledges of fidelity to monarchical principles, and pushed them to exaggeration, if not to madness, since it preferred the adulterous offspring of a king to the interests of a kingdom, and since its love became a crime by calling in aid of the pretensions of those whom it recognized ...
— The Regent's Daughter • Alexandre Dumas (Pere)
... less a roaring and flaming actuality. These things are as substantial, if not as important, as Adeline Genee and Anna Pavlova, the objects of Mr. Walkley's own rhapsodising. Mr. Walkley, never having lacked Liberty, nor cowered for days in a cellar in terror of a howling mob, can see only theatrical exaggeration in the enthusiasm for a land of freedom, just as, never having known or never having had eyes to see the grotesque and tragic creatures existing all around us, he has doubted the reality of some ...
— The Melting-Pot • Israel Zangwill
... Emile and Granier Cassagnac, was neither a model of virtue, disinterestedness, nor self-denial. Nor do we know that it is so now, even under the best of Republics. There are strange tales abroad, even allowing for the exaggeration of Rumor with her hundred tongues. One thing, however, is clear; that the Presse was a liberal paymaster to its feuilletonistes. To Dumas, Sand, De Balzac, Theophile Gautier, and Jules Sandeau, it four years ago paid 300 francs per day for contributions. The Presse, ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... interesting as showing that, strict Conservative though he was, he was not in religious matters narrow-minded; he held his own opinions strongly, but he would never condemn those of other people. He saw "good in everything," and there was but little exaggeration, be it said in all reverence, in the phrase which an old friend of his used in speaking of him to me: "Mr. Dodgson was as broad—as ...
— The Life and Letters of Lewis Carroll • Stuart Dodgson Collingwood
... by different routes. When the sun burst forth with all that inconceivable grandeur which drives artists who visit the country to despair, and causes untravelled gazers on their pictures to accuse them of exaggeration, when their efforts have as a fact fallen far short of the reality, Harry's eyes scanned the horizon in every direction for an enemy, but he was alone ...
— For Fortune and Glory - A Story of the Soudan War • Lewis Hough
... during the Italian Renaissance, from Pulci to Ariosto. (If this instance be made use of, excessive simplification of it must be excused.) Nothing but repetition and imitation could be the result of employing that same material after Ariosto. The result was repetition or imitation, diminution or exaggeration, a spoiling of what had already been achieved; in sum, decadence. The Ariostesque epigoni prove this. Progress begins with the commencement of a new cycle. Cervantes, with his more open and conscious irony, is an instance of this. In what did the ...
— Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic • Benedetto Croce
... events I am not a miser." High Comedy represents those follies which, however striking they may be, are reconcilable with the ordinary course of things; whatever forms a singular exception, and is only conceivable amid an utter perversion of ideas, belongs to the arbitrary exaggeration of farce. Hence since (and it was undoubtedly the case long before) the time of Moliere, the enamoured and avaricious old man has been the peculiar common-place of the Italian masked comedy and opera buffa, to which in truth it certainly belongs. Moliere has treated the main incident, the theft ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... the poor and the rich. The happy sing with them, and the sad weep with them. But I cannot feel any poet so completely my own as Wordsworth. I know many of my friends do not like him. They say he is not a poet. But that is exactly why I like him; he avoids all the hackneyed poetical catch-words, all exaggeration, and everything comprehended in Pegasus-flights. He is true—and does not everything lie in this one word? He opens our eyes to the beauty which lies under our feet like the daisy in the meadow. He calls everything ...
— Memories • Max Muller
... contemporaries do not mean to stand this ideal any longer. They do not want to be owned and cherished, and they do not want to be revered. How far they represent their sex in this matter it is very hard to say. In England in the professional and most intellectually active classes it is scarcely an exaggeration to say that all the most able women below five-and-thirty are workers for the suffrage and the ideal of equal and independent citizenship, and active critics of the conventions under which women live to-day. It is at least plausible to suppose that a day is approaching when the alternatives ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells
... belong to Book iii. in the MSS., but in most editions are printed as a separate Book iv. iv. 1, in hexameters, is the Panegyricus Messallae, written in honour of Messalla's consulship, B.C. 31. Its rhetorical exaggeration and want of taste forbid its being attributed to Tibullus, written, as it was, so shortly before he reached the summit of his powers. Its date puts Lygdamus out of question: doubtless it is by some young member of ...
— The Student's Companion to Latin Authors • George Middleton
... the moral, so to speak? Is there so much wickedness in the world as my father says? So much vice and wealth and selfishness on the one side: so much misery and poverty and crime on the other? You are a doctor, and you must have seen a great deal of London life: you ought to know. Is it an exaggeration, or is ...
— Brooke's Daughter - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... passion of the speaker, the incomprehensible change in his voice, and the utterly disproportionate exaggeration of his attitude towards his daughters, enforced an instantaneous silence. The rain began to drip audibly at the window, the rush of the river sounded distinctly from without, even the shaking of the front part of the dwelling by the distant ...
— A First Family of Tasajara • Bret Harte
... not," said Murray, quietly. "It needs no exaggeration. Look!" he whispered; "we are ...
— The Rajah of Dah • George Manville Fenn
... capacity. In any case it is a one-sided thing, leaving out of court Ulster, the integrity of the Empire, and the obligations of historic continuity. It is a cry that has been echoed by violence and murder, by outrage and ruin, and that has in it one overwhelming element of weakness—exaggeration. It is the cry at its best of enthusiasts whose ideas of human life and governmental potentialities are too generous for every-day practice—at its worst but another word for self. For the men who raise it and hound on these poor dupes to their ...
— About Ireland • E. Lynn Linton
... was the intense force to rouse the ancient world from its easy-going content. It was necessary that purity should become a passion. The dogma of depravity was the intellectual exaggeration of this. A God who died to save men from sin and hell ...
— The Chief End of Man • George S. Merriam
... for a week back, I have been anything from four thousand eight hundred to five thousand two hundred astern. If I have a sixieme, my beast of a partner has a septieme; and if I have three aces, three kings, three queens, and three knaves (excuse the slight exaggeration), the devil holds quatorze of tens! - I remain, my dear James Payn, your sincere and obliged friend - old friend ...
— Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 2 • Robert Louis Stevenson |
