Exaggeration Quotes - Page 10

• I needed to sit down. I'd heard other people talk about having to sit down when shocked by an event or revelation and I had dismissed the notion as pure exaggeration. Little did I realize the actual physical weakness. It felt as if my bones had dissolved and my muscles could no longer support my weight.

  Maria V. Snyder

  People, Support, Weakness

  Maria V. Snyder (2017). “Storm Glass: A Fantasy Novel with Murder and Magic”, p.267, MIRA

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• From a tale one expects a bit of wildness, of exaggeration and dramatic effect. The tale has no inherent concern with decorum, balance or harmony. ... A tale may not display a great deal of structural, psychological, or narrative sophistication, though it might possess all three, but it seldom takes its eye off its primary goal, the creation of a particular emotional state in its reader. Depending on the tale, that state could be wonder, amazement, shock, terror, anger, anxiety, melancholia, or the momentary frisson of horror.

  Peter Straub

  Eye, Emotional, Goal

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• Imagination magnifies small objects with fantastic exaggeration until they fill our soul, and with bold insolence cuts down great things to its own size, as when speaking of God.

  Blaise Pascal

  Cutting, Small Objects, Imagination

  Blaise Pascal (2008). “Human Happiness”, Penguin Group USA

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• But beauty, real beauty, ends where an intellectual expression begins. Intellect is in itself a mode of exaggeration, and destroys the harmony of any face. The moment one sits down to think, one becomes all nose, or all forehead, or something horrid. Look at the successful men in any of the learned professions. How perfectly hideous they are! Except, of course, in the Church. But then in the Church they don't think.

  Oscar Wilde

  Real, Successful, Thinking

  Oscar Wilde (2015). “The Picture of Dorian Gray (Diversion Classics)”, p.7, Diversion Books

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• It is no exaggeration to say that every human being is hypnotized to some extent either by ideas he has uncritically accepted from others or ideas he has repeated to himself or convinced himself are true. These negative ideas have exactly the same effect upon our behavior as the negative ideas implanted into the mind of a hypnotized subject by a professional hypnotist.

  Maxwell Maltz

  Ideas, Mind, Negative

  Maxwell Maltz (2015). “Psycho-Cybernetics: Updated and Expanded”, p.40, Penguin

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• We can say without exaggeration that the present national ambition of the United States is unemployment. People live for quitting time, for weekends, for vacations, and for retirement; moreover, this ambition seems to be classless, as true in the executive suites as on the assembly lines. One works not because the work is necessary, valuable, useful to a desirable end, or because one loves to do it, but only to be able to quit - a condition that a saner time would regard as infernal, a condemnation.

  Wendell Berry

  Retirement, Ambition, Weekend

  Wendell Berry (2009). “Bringing It to the Table: On Farming and Food”, p.36, Counterpoint Press

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• I really think I shall commence chapter forty-four," he said, patting his hands together. "I shall commence, I think, with a slight exaggeration and go on from there into an outright lie. Constance, my dear?" "Yes, Uncle Julian?" "I am going to say that my wife was a beautiful woman.

  Shirley Jackson

  Beautiful, Uncles, Lying

  Shirley Jackson (2014). “We Have Always Lived in the Castle”, p.45, Obelix Books

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• If cynicism and love lie at opposite ends of a spectrum, do we not sometimes fall in love in order to escape the debilitating cynicism to which we are prone? Is there not in every coup de foudre a certain willful exaggeration of the qualities of the beloved, an exaggeration which distracts us from our habitual pessimism and focuses our energies on someone in whom we can believe in a way we have never believed in ourselves?

  Alain de Botton

  Falling In Love, Lying, Believe

  Alain de Botton (2015). “On Love: A Novel”, p.15, Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

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• Magnifying a matter is not the way to mend it.

  Ivy Compton-Burnett

  Matter, Way, Magnifying

  Ivy Compton-Burnett (2011). “Parents and Children”, p.28, A&C Black

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• I've played drug dealers, all my life. I've made a career of killing people and playing all kinds of killers. The violence and drugs is portrayed in exaggeration. This is fiction. That is how I looked at it. And, sometimes truth is stranger than fiction. Just open a newspaper.

  Benicio Del Toro

  Careers, People, Drug

  Source: collider.com

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• It has been remarked that when one passes among the patients of the psychiatric ward, he encounters among the several sufferers every aspect of normal personality in morbid exaggeration. ... As one passes through the modern centers of enterprise and of higher learning, he is met with similar autonomies of development. ... The scientist, the technician, the scholar, who have left the One for the Many are puffed up with vanity over their ability to describe precisely some minute portion of the world. Men so obsessed with fragments can no more be reasoned with than other psychotics.

  Richard M. Weaver

  Men, Vanity, Personality

  "Ideas have Consequences". Book by Richard M. Weaver, p. 62, 1948.

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• Americans specially love superlatives. The phrases 'biggest in the world,' 'finest in the world,' are on all lips.

  Isabella Bird

  United States, Phrases, World

  Isabella L. Bird (2012). “A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains”, p.128, Courier Corporation

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• Indeed, so far from being humorous, the male American is the most abnormally serious creature who ever existed.. It is only fair to admit that he can exaggerate, but even his exaggeration has a rational basis. It is not founded on wit or fancy; it does not spring from any poetic imagination.

  Oscar Wilde

  Spring, Humorous, Imagination

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• Am I to assume you would rather not have us as clients?"
 "Let me think about that for a nanosecond," Dickie said. "Yes! Last time you were in my office you tried to kill me."
 "That's an exaggeration. Maim you, yes. Kill you, probably not."


  Janet Evanovich

  Thinking, Office, Lasts

  FaceBook post by Janet Evanovich from Jul 24, 2014

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• It is in fact no exaggeration to say that we live in terror that Senator McCarthy will one day make some irreparable blunder that will play directly into the hands of our common enemy and discredit the whole anti-Communist effort for a long while to come.

  Whittaker Chambers

  Hands, Play, Long

  Whittaker Chambers (1969). “Odyssey of a Friend: Whittaker Chambers' Letters to William F. Buckley, Jr., 1954-1961”, New York : Putnam

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• I never once made a discovery ... I speak without exaggeration that I have constructed three thousand different theories in connection with the electric light ... Yet in only two cases did my experiments prove the truth of my theory.

  Thomas A. Edison

  Light, Discovery, Two

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• Before she is an individual, a shaman is foremost a vehicle for receiving and expressing the grief and indignation of the people within society. The otherworldly strength that you see during a gut is the raging effort to forget and overcome the weakness of the self and is possible because it bears all the wrath and indignation of the people against oppression. Extraordinary acts performed with remarkable exaggeration encounter the human instinct to demolish one's own limitations, producing catharsis.

  Hyon Gyon

  Grief, People, Effort

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• The most important issues to address are the truly existential threats we face: climate change and nuclear war. On the former, the Republican leadership, in splendid isolation from the world, is almost unanimously dedicated to destroying the chances for decent survival; strong words, but no exaggeration. There is a great deal that can be done at the local and state level to counter their malign project.

  Noam Chomsky

  Strong, War, Survival

  "Noam Chomsky: On Trump and the State of the Union". Interview with George Yancy, www.nytimes.com. July 5, 2017.

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• Christianity had ceased to be the creed of the poor. He spoke with pompous exaggeration. Whether man were the best or the worst of created beings.

  Georg Ebers

  Men, Christianity, Poor

  Georg Ebers “The Historical Romances of Georg Ebers”, Library of Alexandria

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• I'm allergic to over-promising. I'm allergic to exaggeration, because I've been in schools for a large part of my life, and I still go to schools. What I want is realistic, evidence-based kinds of things that know the history of efforts to individualize instruction and why they flop before, so you can have a much smarter approach to reforming schools, to improve what goes on in classrooms.

  Larry Cuban

  School, Effort, Kind

  Source: www.pbs.org

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• Nietzsche ... does not shy from conscious exaggeration and one-sided formulations of his thought, believing that in this way he can most clearly set in relief what in his vision and in his inquiry is different from the run-of-the-mill.

  Martin Heidegger

  Running, Believe, Vision

  Martin Heidegger (1979). “Nietzsche: The will to power as art”

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• My one piece of advice to anyone trying to do acting - this would just be to keep going. It sounds really basic, but I went to 121 auditions my first year in L.A. That is no exaggeration, because I keep lists - I know it's a little psychotic - of every audition that I have ever been to. I went to 121 auditions and I got none. But who cares?

  Ana Mulvoy-Ten

  Advice, Trying, Acting

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• There is a radical and unprecedented shift [in war] that is part of the general transformation of civilization. First, understand that the past 150 years of warfare are totally unprecedented in that we introduced a breathtakingly inefficient technology: guns. In the First World War, and this is not an exaggeration, it took 10,000 rounds of ammunition to kill one person. Any given shot had a one in 10,000 probability of ending someone's life.

  George Friedman

  War, Technology, Gun

  Source: www.psychologytoday.com

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• White people deserve to be hit, deserve to be the victims of crime and acts of terror because they have for so long been the unfair, unjust, immoral majority throughout most of the nations that are imbued with Western civilization. If you think that’s an exaggeration, it isn’t. That is exactly how the Democrat Party of today and the American left looks at things.

  Rush Limbaugh

  Party, Thinking, Civilization

  "Scrambling Liberals Don’t Know Who to Blame for the Istanbul Airport Attack". "The Rush Limbaugh Show", www.rushlimbaugh.com. June 29, 2016.

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• In Obama's world, it's Fox News and me that are the reason the Republican base doesn't like him. It can't possibly be that those people actually pay attention, are actually intelligent, informed, and they actually disagree with what he's doing. It can't be that because you are not that smart and independently thinkable. You're like the Democrat base. You're bunch of idiots who only know and do and believe what you're told. There may be a degree of exaggeration in there, but that is exactly how the left looks at their voters, and that's how they look at the whole population.

  Rush Limbaugh

  Smart, Believe, Intelligent

  Source: www.rushlimbaugh.com

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