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More "Exaggeration" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the public than he, and yet he loved privacy more than publicity. He had acquaintances numberless, and facile and gracious manners, but his heart was open to very few. His eloquence was luxuriant and efflorescent, but he was also a close and compact reasoner. He had a vein of playful exaggeration in his common speech, but his temperament was earnest, impassioned, almost melancholy. The more nearly one knew Mr. Choate, the more cause had he to ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 63, January, 1863 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... did not "keep up with the times," and she was left by the receding tide, a 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 to condemn that, which, ...
— Clemence - The Schoolmistress of Waveland • Retta Babcock
... exaggeration to say that the social well-being of the community is threatened. The habits of years are broken up; sad to say, the middle-aged will suffer unrelieved, but the young can be incited to grapple with the situation and hew out for themselves ...
— The Cost of Shelter • Ellen H. Richards
... character was strongly and with exaggeration personified. The Company's servants had repeatedly detected him in the most criminal intrigues. On one occasion he brought a false charge against another Hindoo, and tried to substantiate it by producing forged documents. On another occasion it was discovered that, while professing ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... doubt as to whether this statement were not an exaggeration, I have submitted it before publication to my friend Mr. Eirikr Magnusson of Cambridge, whose profound knowledge of European literature, ancient and modern, needs no attestation from me. He replies that, except ...
— Wagner's Tristan und Isolde • George Ainslie Hight
... The one hard, stern, realistic, 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 by what ...
— Lord Kilgobbin • Charles Lever
... 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 ...
— Station Amusements • Lady Barker
... there must have been more in him than mere pedantry; there was indeed a heart in the man, which Marcus found, and he found also a tongue which could speak the truth. Fronto's letters are by no means free from exaggeration and laudation, but they do not show that loathsome flattery which filled the Roman court. He really admires what he praises, and his way of saying so is not unlike what often passes for criticism at the ...
— Meditations • Marcus Aurelius
... proceeded, without very much exaggeration, to detail, in his own way, the meeting they had with the mysterious being at Mucklestane-Moor, concluding, he could not conjecture what on earth it could be, unless it was either the Enemy himsell, or some of the auld Peghts that ...
— The Black Dwarf • Sir Walter Scott
... 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. ...
— Arthur Mervyn - Or, Memoirs of the Year 1793 • Charles Brockden Brown
... was duly made known at Philadelphia, and the President assured Congress that no terms were obtainable from France "compatible with the safety, honor, and general interest of the nation." The opposition thought this an exaggeration, and called for the despatches, expecting refusal or abridgment. The President sent ...
— History of the United States, Volume 2 (of 6) • E. Benjamin Andrews
... special revelation—he brought the light of a mystic intuition. Some of his elders judged it to be 'false fire' perilously akin to the 'enthusiasm' which their predecessors had so often condemned. In daring simplicity he urged that there had been 'noxious exaggeration about the person of Jesus.' 'The soul knows no persons.' The divine is always latent in the human. Revelation is not ended—as ...
— Unitarianism • W.G. Tarrant
... doctrine are made from the point of view of caution. There is danger of exaggeration, it is said; for if in its terms it is plainly Catholic, it may sound Protestant to some ears. And in fact to those whose glances have been ever turned outward for guidance it seems like ...
— Life of Father Hecker • Walter Elliott
... "grand salon" of the Maison Doree, only that his torture had gone too far. It seemed to me that I ought to have heard his very soul scream while we were seated at supper. But in a moment he had ceased to care for me. I was nothing. To the crazy exaggeration of his jealousy I was but one amongst a hundred thousand. What was my death? Nothing. All mankind had possessed that woman. I knew what his wooing of her would be: ...
— The Arrow of Gold - a story between two notes • Joseph Conrad
... occupied by armed men, and the field-pieces of the train placed in the street, pointing towards the building. The lower floor was used as an Exchange by the merchants, who were annoyed by being obliged daily to brush by the red-coats. All this was excessively irritating, and needed no exaggeration from abroad. Still it is but just to the men of that day to present all the circumstances under which they maintained their dignity. "Asiatic despotism," so says a contemporary London eulogy on their conduct, which was printed in the Boston journals, "does not present a picture more odious to ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 58, August, 1862 • Various
... folk-tales. This might explain the great divergence between the "historical" and the romantic aspects of the saga as it now exists. Yet we cannot fail to see that what is claimed as historical is full of exaggeration, and, in spite of the pleading of Dr. Hyde and other patriots, little historic fact can be found in it. Even if this exists, it is the least important part of the saga. What is important is that part—nine-tenths of the whole—which "is not true because it cannot be true." It belongs to the ...
— The Religion of the Ancient Celts • J. A. MacCulloch
... justice in your apportionment of blame. There may, on various occasions, have been some small dereliction of duty. But you'll have been observing that in the recent exposition of my philosophy I have not laboured the point of duty to disproportionate exaggeration." ...
— The Rough Road • William John Locke
... 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 ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... had dreamed of traveling by the great, the unique, the world-renowned New York-Chicago train; indeed, it would not be a gross exaggeration to say that I came to America in order to take that train; and at length time brought my dream true. I boarded the thing in New York, this especial product of the twentieth century, and yet another thrilling moment in my life came and went! I boarded it with pride; everybody boarded it with ...
— Your United States - Impressions of a first visit • Arnold Bennett
... is an instance of Cellini's exaggeration. He did more than yeoman's service, no doubt, but we cannot believe that, without him, the castle would ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 9 • Various
... 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
... love in its high, generous, and spiritual sense), Mr. Harlowe had determined on offering his hand and fortune to the unportioned orphan. He did so, and was accepted. I did not conceal my dislike of her suitor from Edith; and my wife—who, with feminine exaggeration of the hints I threw out, had set him down as a kind of polished human tiger—with tears intreated her to avoid the glittering snare. We of course had neither right nor power to push our opposition beyond friendly warning and advice; and ...
— The Experiences of a Barrister, and Confessions of an Attorney • Samuel Warren
... to the utmost with the bricks. Meanwhile we questioned black and white witnesses, and learned for the first tune that the Rebels admitted a repulse at Township Landing, and that Lieutenant Jones and ten of their number were killed,—though this I fancy to have been an exaggeration. They also declared that the mysterious steamer Berosa was lying at the head of the river, but was a broken-down and worthless affair, and would never get to sea. The result has since proved this; for the vessel subsequently ran the blockade and foundered near shore, the crew barely escaping ...
— Army Life in a Black Regiment • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... to him that he had never seen a soldier work before. In figure, in pose, in action there was a perfection about him that awakened at once admiration and envy. Below the average height, yet not insignificant, erect, without exaggeration, precise in movement without angularity, swift in action without haste, he was ...
— The Sky Pilot in No Man's Land • Ralph Connor
... in rapid review what may perhaps without exaggeration be referred to as an array of conditions and theories, ideals and policies. It remains to refer to the actual results which have come about during these sixty years as respects them, or because of them; and, finally, to reach if possible ...
— 'Tis Sixty Years Since • Charles Francis Adams
... 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 slight ...
— The Elements of Drawing - In Three Letters to Beginners • John Ruskin
... evolution.... The book is evidently the result of years of close observation and study. Its method is admirable, the induction is broad and reliable, while the conclusions drawn in most cases are both rigorously logical and avoid even the suspicion of exaggeration. We predict a high place in the annals of biological science will yet be assigned to this admirable ...
— The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought • Alexander F. Chamberlain
... served a purpose in the education of the race. While the exaggeration of familiar attributes easily awakens mirth in a simple mind, it does more: it teaches practical lessons of wisdom and discretion. And possibly the lesson was the ...
— Stories to Tell to Children • Sara Cone Bryant
... same degree and manner. In such a genus as Labrus, which includes some of the most splendid fishes in the world—for instance, the Peacock Labrus (L. pavo), described (28. Bory Saint Vincent, in 'Dict. Class. d'Hist. Nat.' tom. ix. 1826, p. 151.), with pardonable exaggeration, as formed of polished scales of gold, encrusting lapis-lazuli, rubies, sapphires, emeralds, and amethysts—we may, with much probability, accept this belief; for we have seen that the sexes in at least one species of the genus differ greatly in colour. With some fishes, as with many of the ...
— The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex • Charles Darwin
... an exaggeration to say (as has been said) that the sentiment of the sacred obligation of opinion was first formulated or created in the world by the early Christian martyrs—before their time Socrates, Jews in the Antiochian persecution, and probably others, had embodied this sentiment—but the Christian ...
— Introduction to the History of Religions - Handbooks on the History of Religions, Volume IV • Crawford Howell Toy
... which would be read by foreigners and even by Indians, and thus bring reproach on the Spanish national honour. He expressed astonishment that the Emperor permitted the publication and circulation of such books, taxing their author with wilful exaggeration and false statements, and pointing out that the accusations brought more dishonour on the monarch than on ...
— Bartholomew de Las Casas; his life, apostolate, and writings • Francis Augustus MacNutt
... of truth, blended with some exaggeration, mixed up with this statement of tire mate. As a matter of course, the captain of the Speedy had not sent away his best men, though they were not quite as bad as Marble, in his desire to overcome them, was disposed to fancy. It is true, ...
— Miles Wallingford - Sequel to "Afloat and Ashore" • James Fenimore Cooper
... no attack on the camp. In the morning one of our carriers, who ventured less than fifty yards beyond the barrier, received a spear through his left arm and another through his side, and though I am almost afraid to relate it for fear of being thought guilty of exaggeration, the man plucked the spear out of his side in a moment, and, hurling it back, killed his opponent. I ventured outside and proved the truth of the man's story, by finding the Dobodura man transfixed with his own spear. Both our man's wounds were bad ones, but he did not ...
— Wanderings Among South Sea Savages And in Borneo and the Philippines • H. Wilfrid Walker
... unquenchable people, warns the world against undue haste. After describing the deplorable state or the non-existence of Albanian schools, roads, ports, the monetary system and the organization of credit, he says that it is scarcely an exaggeration to assert that from the point of view of economic arrangement everything has to be created. This necessitates a Government which knows how to administer and which has funds at its command. But there is not the least likelihood of regular taxes being paid to a central Government until you have security ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 2 • Henry Baerlein
... position, How far does this liberty extend? Is Imagination absolute, supreme, and uncontrolled in its own sphere, or is it under the guidance and government of reason? That its dominion is not universal is obvious, but of its influence we are all conscious, and there is no exaggeration in the ...
— Select Poems of Thomas Gray • Thomas Gray
... send for Mr. Goodwin, and the magistrate approached the head of the bed, and, speaking solemnly, exhorted the wounded man, as he expected soon to give an account of the works done in his body, to speak the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, without reserve, malice or exaggeration, both as to ...
— Capitola the Madcap • Emma D. E. N. Southworth
... 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 ...
— Old-Fashioned Ethics and Common-Sense Metaphysics - With Some of Their Applications • William Thomas Thornton
... called "Aunt Sally, or the Cross the Way to Freedom," as being the most faithful account of the evils of slavery we have met with. It is the story of a female slave's life, and is said to be strictly true and devoid of all exaggeration, and it is a most touching account of the power of religion in her case, in upholding her through a long life of ...
— First Impressions of the New World - On Two Travellers from the Old in the Autumn of 1858 • Isabella Strange Trotter
... conquerors who had subdued an earlier population. We always find mention of the wealth of the Gauls in gold, and yet France has no rivers that carry gold-sand, and the Pyrenees were then no longer in their possession: the gold must therefore have been obtained by barter. Much may be exaggeration; and the fact of some noble individuals wearing gold chains was probably transferred by ancient poets to the whole nation, since popular poetry takes great liberty, ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 2 • Various
... 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, poor fool! that the storm ...
— On the Church Steps • Sarah C. Hallowell
... festival; six judges of these Olympic games retire and select the brightest compositions, which the respective successful acknowledge, kneel to Mrs. Calliope Miller, kiss her fair hand, and are crowned by it with myrtle, with—I don't know what. You may think this is fiction, or exaggeration. Be dumb, unbelievers! The collection is printed, published.—Yes, on my faith, there are bouts-rimes on a buttered muffin, made by her Grace the Duchess of Northumberland; receipts to make them by Corydon the venerable, alias George Pitt; others very pretty, by Lord Palmerston; ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole - Volume II • Horace Walpole
... Some exaggeration must be allowed for in all this account of Alfred the Great. But the fact that he left a stamp in his age so deep,—that nothing except what was good and great has been ascribed to him,—that the very fictions told of him are of such vraisemblance and magnitude as to FIT IN to nothing less than ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... with an itch for movement, and I walked for two hours and a half imagining all sorts of things, pretending that I was travelling in Russia or in Norway. When the tide came in and cracked the cakes of ice in the Seine and the thin ice which covered the stream, it was, without any exaggeration, superb. Then I thought of ...
— The George Sand-Gustave Flaubert Letters • George Sand, Gustave Flaubert
... has its variants, but in every instance I have retained that particular version which seemed to me to be the most characteristic, and have given it without embellishment and without exaggeration. ...
— Uncle Remus • Joel Chandler Harris
... this maze of savage fancy and priestly invention and wild exaggeration there are some points that stand out clearly. Indra is a god of the people, particularly of the fighting man, a glorified type of the fair-haired, hard-fighting, hard-drinking forefathers of the Indian Aryans and their distant cousins the Hellenes; and therefore ...
— Hindu Gods And Heroes - Studies in the History of the Religion of India • Lionel D. Barnett
... children, by growing sickness and a changed and deteriorated diet the Irish race still presents a type, superior physically, intellectually and morally to the English. It was on Irish soldiers that the English chiefly relied in the Boer War, and it is no exaggeration to say that could all the Irishmen in the ranks of the British army have been withdrawn, a purely British force would have failed to end the war and the Dutch would have remained masters of ...
— The Crime Against Europe - A Possible Outcome of the War of 1914 • Roger Casement
... That was exaggeration, of course. He was not wordless, for the letter contained almost a superfluity of words; but people often said things ...
— Fair Harbor • Joseph Crosby Lincoln
... eagerly gazed at by the younger, Guy Darrell listened calmly, throughout a long field-night, to voices that must have roused from forgotten graves kindling and glorious memories; voices of those veterans now—by whose side he had once struggled for some cause which he had then, in the necessary exaggeration of all honest enthusiasm, identified with a nation's life-blood. Voices, too of the old antagonists over whose routed arguments he had marched triumphant amidst applauses that the next day rang again through England from side to side. Hark! the very man with whom, in the old battle-days, he had ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... in an encouraging, inquiring tone. "Peter is certainly neuter. I think one might say negative, without gross exaggeration. Still, I should hardly stop him. He finds enough difficulty in getting out an occasional remark without putting a stopper in him. Perhaps, though, I mistake your meaning, and you want Peter merely to stop here ...
— The Honorable Peter Stirling and What People Thought of Him • Paul Leicester Ford
... year of his age, and the very morning of his fame, fell with the rest, and his kindred, the Sil-Murray, were left for a season an easy prey to William de Burgh and John de Bermingham, the joint commanders in the battle. The spirit of exaggeration common in most accounts of killed and wounded, has described this day as fatal to the name and race of O'Conor, who are represented as cut off to a man in the conflict; the direct line which Felim represented was indeed left ...
— A Popular History of Ireland - From the earliest period to the emancipation of the Catholics • Thomas D'Arcy McGee
... headquarters of wholesale and retail commerce, or in the pleasant suburban villages, which blend into a considerable whole. [Population.] The total population of city and suburbs has been estimated, perhaps with some exaggeration, at 200,000. [Bridges.] A handsome old stone bridge of ten arches serves as the communication between the two banks of the Pasig, which, more recently, has also been spanned by an iron suspension bridge. [43] Very little intercourse exists between the inhabitants of ...
— The Former Philippines thru Foreign Eyes • Fedor Jagor; Tomas de Comyn; Chas. Wilkes; Rudolf Virchow.
... 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 ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 13 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Lovers • Elbert Hubbard
... training? The consequence is, that either the Catholic children become ashamed of their holy religion, and despise their parents, or, if they have the courage to hold out, their tender minds are subject to numberless petty annoyances; they must endure a species of martyrdom. This is no exaggeration; I have it from good authority. Practically speaking, the present common school system is but a gigantic scheme for ...
— Public School Education • Michael Mueller
... such words as these true and appropriate. They open the very depths of his heart in a way from which a less noble and fervid nature would have shrunk, and express his absolute consecration in his work, and his eager desire for their spiritual good, with such force as would have been exaggeration in ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... of the future" it has been called; and when we consider the vast marts of commerce that such a highway would bring in direct contact, it is impossible to think the name thus enthusiastically given an exaggeration. An overland passage between China and Burmah has long been known and made use of by the native merchants of these countries. From time immemorial it has served as a highway for invading armies or peaceful ...
— The Galaxy, Volume 23, No. 2, February, 1877 • Various
... the spiritless, mechanical philanthrophy of unemployed orators of about fourth-form standard intellectually; against the monotonous and insincere tirades of paid agitators and their restless disciples; against laziness; ignorance, greed, and exaggeration masquerading as popular scientific economy; and against the brutal and extortionate upthrust from below. And so we shall arrive at the reverse kind of folly, an admiration and bad imitation of foreign pride and pomp, an arrogant individualism ...
— The New Society • Walther Rathenau
... the subject all interested in agriculture are well aware. It is no exaggeration to say that the introduction of the practice of artificial manuring has revolutionised modern husbandry. Indeed, without the aid of artificial manures, arable farming, as at present carried out, would be impossible. Fifty years ago the practice may be said to have been ...
— Manures and the principles of manuring • Charles Morton Aikman
... business (wholesale hardware) has become more and more urgent of late. It is imperative that I should get home at once owing to the total incapability of my partner to carry out simple directions which are dictated by letters, and it is no exaggeration to say that the business, which has been built up almost entirely by my efforts, must inevitably collapse unless it receives my ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, Jan. 29, 1919 • Various
... diminish, classes segregate. There arises a caste of wage-earners never to be anything but wage-earners; a caste of property-owners, handing on their property to their descendants; and substantially, after all deductions have been made for exaggeration and simplification, a division of society into capitalists and proletarians. American society is beginning to crystallise out into the forms of European society. For, once more, America is nothing new; she is a repetition of the old ...
— Appearances - Being Notes of Travel • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... 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 their ...
— The Call of the Beaver Patrol - or, A Break in the Glacier • V. T. Sherman
... depart wholly from all resemblance; a fault which writers deservedly celebrated frequently commit, that they may raise, as the occasion requires, either mirth or abhorrence. Some enlargement may be allowed to declamation, and some exaggeration to burlesque; but as they deviate farther from reality, they become less useful, because their lessons will fail of application. The mind of the reader is carried away from the contemplation of his own manners; he finds in himself ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D, In Nine Volumes - Volume the Third: The Rambler, Vol. II • Samuel Johnson
... and profoundly unsatisfactory to Ralph, but after the astonishing variations of his own sentiments during the past half-hour he could not accuse her of fanciful exaggeration. ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf
... 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 ...
— The Winning of Popular Government - A Chronicle of the Union of 1841 • Archibald Macmechan
... much longer, I can tell you. If you deceive Dr. Townsend, and make him believe you're sick, you can't deceive me. No doubt you feel mighty comfortable, lyin' here with nothing to do, while I'm a slavin' myself to death down stairs, waitin' upon you; (this was a slight exaggeration, as Aunt Lucy took the entire charge of Paul, including the preparation of his food;) but you'd better make the most of it, for you won't lie here much longer. You'll miss not bein' able to talk ...
— Paul Prescott's Charge • Horatio Alger
... has become historical, and has coloured the whole modern judgment of Godwin. It would be no exaggeration to say that Godwin formed Shelley's mind, and that Prometheus Unbound and Hellas were the greatest of Godwin's works. That debt is too often forgotten, while literary gossip loves to remind us that it was repaid in cheques and post-obits. The intellectual relationship ...
— Shelley, Godwin and Their Circle • H. N. Brailsford
... sane. If, however, they will have the patience to read to the end, I believe that this unfavorable impression will disappear; for I there combine the religious impulses with other principles of common sense which serve as correctives of exaggeration, and allow the individual reader to draw as moderate conclusions ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... encouraged it, anticipating with ecstasy each stage in the mounting of the illusion. For when he was sober he saw Poppy very much as she was; but when he was drunk she became for him a being immaculate, divine. He moved in a region of gross but glorious exaggeration, where his wretched little Cockney passion assumed the proportions of a superb romance. His soul that minute was the home of the purest, most exalted emotions. Yes, he could certainly feel it coming on. Poppy's face was growing bigger and ...
— The Divine Fire • May Sinclair
... Washington to the man who has brought this very light to such perfection, turning over page after page of well-nigh incredible description of the country which has raised the system of "booming" to a high art, till my brain reels with an Arabian Nightish flavour of exaggeration, and turning off the electric current, I am gradually lulled to sleep by the rhythmical vibrations of the steamer, the sole reminder that I am in reality sleeping upon a ship and about to enjoy a ...
— The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol 2 (of 2) • Harry Furniss
... enabled to give from the manuscript life of John Shaw, vicar of Rotherham; with a little tediousness, but with infinite naivete, he relates what happened to himself. This honest divine was puritanically inclined, but there can be no exaggeration in these unvarnished facts. He tells a remarkable story of the state of religious knowledge in Lancashire, at a place called Cartmel: some of the people appeared desirous of religious instruction, declaring that they were without any minister, and ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... and especially in our own Commonwealth, the time has arrived when, as we believe, the interests of Commerce and Arts, as well as General Education, call for the most earnest cooperation of intelligent culture with industrial pursuits. It is no exaggeration to state that probably no project was ever before presented to the wealthy men of Massachusetts which appealed so earnestly to their aid or gave such fair promise of doing good. The institute in question is one ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. II. July, 1862. No. 1. • Various
... 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
... 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 look like ...
— December Love • Robert Hichens
... doctrines in every issue. No matter to what extremes the organs of this or that opinion may go, they will never go quite far enough to please the purists on their own side; even as the portrayer of this magnificent personage is pretty certain to be accused of exaggeration, whereas he has done his best to soften down some of the cruder tones and dim the more startling tints ...
— The Jealousies of a Country Town • Honore de Balzac
... who had apprised them had, according to their statement, absolutely witnessed the approach of the multitude, and so they had locked up their cottages, crossed the bridge, and ran away to the woods and moor. Under these circumstances, deeming that there might be much exaggeration, Sybil at length resolved to advance, and in a few minutes those whom she had encountered were out of sight. She patted Harold, who looked up in her face and gave a bark, significant of his approbation of her proceeding, and also of his consciousness that something strange ...
— Sybil - or the Two Nations • Benjamin Disraeli
... day will serve as a sample of the rest, for they are all exactly alike, and their characteristics reduce themselves to two—either the children are well, or they are not. For me, in this solitary grange, it is no exaggeration to say that hours become minutes, or minutes hours, according ...
— Letters of Two Brides • Honore de Balzac
... was forgetting all his English, as he had been away from England for five years." And a fourth writes, "The great majority of these Italians have been in different parts of America" (this of course is a wild exaggeration!), "they are very delighted to have a chat. In fact I think the Italian people are very sociable. Nearly all the boys can begin to make themselves understood." These tributes are obviously sincere. They occur in the midst of good-natured grumbles about the heat, and the monotony ...
— With British Guns in Italy - A Tribute to Italian Achievement • Hugh Dalton
... he set to work; and it may be said without exaggeration, that he was then as extraordinary, as incomparable, as at ...
— Memoirs of the Private Life, Return, and Reign of Napoleon in 1815, Vol. I • Pierre Antoine Edouard Fleury de Chaboulon
... points of "the trade," and have woven these together into a tale, the warp of which is composed of thick cords of fact; the woof of slight lines of fiction, just sufficient to hold the fabric together. Exaggeration has easily been avoided, because—as Dr Livingstone says in regard ...
— Black Ivory • R.M. Ballantyne
... Finn said so it would probably be so, with some little allowance for Irish exaggeration. He is a clever man, with less of his country's hyperbole than others;—but still not ...
— The Duke's Children • Anthony Trollope
... looked upon as an exaggeration of ordinary night sleep, the latter differing from the former only in its brevity. In the natural sleep of non-hibernating species there occurs, too, a fall in temperature. Moreover, they all, even man, have a certain capacity for winter sleep, as the experiences of travellers and explorers ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.
... 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 ...
— Home Rule - Second Edition • Harold Spender
... arrangement he fits it on a Bunsen burner, and places an ordinary lamp chimney over it. When the flame is applied, the "mantle" becomes incandescent, and gives out a brilliant yellow light, which, it may be said without exaggeration, will compare favorably with any electric light yet put ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 601, July 9, 1887 • Various
... show that any of the senior staff of the army took steps to establish new crossing points or to ensure free use of those which existed. Only General Pelet, who is a great admirer of Napoleon and who, for this reason, is sometimes given to exaggeration, writing fifteen years after the battle, states that M. Odier, the deputy quartermaster of the Imperial Guard, told him several times that he was present when one morning (he does say on what day) the Emperor ordered a general on his staff to look ...
— The Memoirs of General the Baron de Marbot, Translated by - Oliver C. Colt • Baron de Marbot
... of those street-robbers to whose gang the malefactors we are now speaking of belong be at present too recent a fact to be questioned, yet possibly in future times 'twill be thought an exaggeration of truth to say that even at noon-day, and in the most open places in London, persons were stopped and robbed. The offenders for many months escaped with impunity, until those crimes became so frequent and the terrors of passengers so great that the Government interposed in an extraordinary ...
— Lives Of The Most Remarkable Criminals Who have been Condemned and Executed for Murder, the Highway, Housebreaking, Street Robberies, Coining or other offences • Arthur L. Hayward
... is something serious to contemplate. On an average, for all Ireland, it is not under 20 per cent., or a fifth of the actual value of the crop." This is a startling statement; but I do not believe it to be an exaggeration of the actual state ...
— The Stock-Feeder's Manual - the chemistry of food in relation to the breeding and - feeding of live stock • Charles Alexander Cameron
... beautiful,—in streaks it is as fine as anything that he ever wrote: but both of these works belong to literature because they are packed full of omissions,—which Stevenson himself called 'a kind of negative exaggeration.' No, my dear boy, old Goethe found the right title for a book of reminiscences when he wrote 'Wahrheit und Dichtung.' Truth and poetry,—that is what it is bound to be. I don't know whether Goethe was as honest a man as Wordsworth and Stevenson, but I reckon he told about as much of the ...
— Days Off - And Other Digressions • Henry Van Dyke
... a perfectly nice sort of woman, and that the German princess, noticing Kitty's devotion, praised her, calling her an angel of consolation. All this would have been very well, if there had been no exaggeration. But the princess saw that her daughter was rushing into extremes, and ...
— Anna Karenina • Leo Tolstoy
... dale; poetical exaggeration or hyperbole, implying that fragrant flowers became even ...
— Milton's Comus • John Milton
... But this proves that my morality had not yet taught me rigidly to chastise myself into truth; nor had it been in the least aided by the example of the agreeable Enoch. Perhaps I did not even, at the moment, suspect myself to be guilty of exaggeration. ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft
... of exaggeration, describing a human anomaly on the roll of attorneys? The fact shall be left to answer the question. Mr. Mool had made a mistake in his choice of a profession. The result of the mistake was—a ...
— Heart and Science - A Story of the Present Time • Wilkie Collins
... of the Rev. J. Robertson in the field, it is unnecessary to write, as the newspaper correspondents have referred so often to his bravery and splendid services. One correspondent writes to me: "It is no exaggeration to say that the whole of Methuen's army, and especially the Highland Brigade, deem his bravery worthy of the V.C. Everywhere, in train or camp, officers' mess or soldiers' tent, Padre Robertson is proclaimed ...
— From Aldershot to Pretoria - A Story of Christian Work among Our Troops in South Africa • W. E. Sellers
... always, horribly, of me! I am not half so black as they allege. You know, exaggeration is to them What whiskey is to most men. But time bursts Their bubbles—or at least we come to take Their work as merely art. Thus their description As art is not so bad; but if you seek For truth, ...
— Mr. Faust • Arthur Davison Ficke
... with some genuinely good people,—with some people, as she said herself,—"of truth and of life." These are remarkable words to hear drop from the lips of a young girl, and especially a girl of Mercy's environment. Now, had there been anything hollow, had there been one atom of insincerity or exaggeration about Christiana that morning, had she talked too much, had all her actions not far more than borne out all her words, had there not been in the broken-hearted woman a depth of mind and a warmth of heart far beyond all her words, Mercy would never ...
— Bunyan Characters (Second Series) • Alexander Whyte
... religious 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 that of the mass of all that ...
— Roman Catholicism in Spain • Anonymous
... they are most easily distinguished: but their genius has also an internal character; and the peculiarities of their taste may be discovered, without the assistance of their diction. Next after great familiarity of language, there is nothing that appears to them so meritorious as perpetual exaggeration of thought. There must be nothing moderate, natural, or easy, about their sentiments. There must be a "qu'il mourut," and a "let there be light," in every line; and all their characters must be in agonies and ecstasies, from their ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... water. Its red rays shone through red haze. Distances that had formerly been clearly outlined were now dim, obscured. The yawning chasm was not the same. It circled wider, redder, deeper. It was a weird, ghastly mouth of hell. Gale stood fascinated, unable to tell how much he saw was real, how much exaggeration of overwrought emotions. There was no beauty here, but an unparalleled grandeur, a sublime scene of devastation and desolation which might have had its counterpart upon the burned-out moon. The mood that gripped Gale now added to its somber portent ...
— Desert Gold • Zane Grey
... to carry out the sentence of the law with the forms of the law. The Government did not venture to let the troops or the people face the Marshal. The forms of the law could not be carried out, the demands of revenge could be. And if this be thought any exaggeration, the proof of the ill effects of this murder, for its form makes it difficult to call it anything else, is ready to our hands. It was impossible to get the public to believe that Ney had really been killed in this manner, and nearly to this day we have had fresh stories recurring of the real ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne
... two women pursued that poor devil and flayed the skin off him as if they had done it with whips. I tell you his mind bled almost visibly. I seem to see him stand, naked to the waist, his forearms shielding his eyes, and flesh hanging from him in rags. I tell you that is no exaggeration of what I feel. It was as if Leonora and Nancy banded themselves together to do execution, for the sake of humanity, upon the body of a man who was at their disposal. They were like a couple of Sioux who had got hold of an Apache and had him well tied to a stake. I tell you ...
— The Good Soldier • Ford Madox Ford
... by superstition in India is not very different from the European type, otherwise than in a certain exaggeration, impressed on it, no doubt, by the grotesque grandeur of the mythology. Witchcraft is pretty nearly the same in both regions—the old women being the chief professors of the art; but in many districts of the former country, the ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 437 - Volume 17, New Series, May 15, 1852 • Various
... two dollars per ton on the river route, via New Orleans, and ten dollars per ton over the railroad routes. The completion of a comparatively short canal of eighty miles, to cover the gap from Buchanan to the upper Kanawha, would without the shadow of exaggeration save the West forty millions of dollars a year; and the central water-line would yield an interest of ten to fifteen per cent. on the capital invested, while opening a continuous water-road from Liverpool to Omaha, running nearly due west, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 11, No. 24, March, 1873 • Various
... Naples two days since, an Englishman of intelligence and impartiality, who has resided there for months in the heart of the politics. He told me that the exaggeration of evils was great. Evils there were certainly; and no government succeeding Garibaldi's could have satisfied a public trained to expect the impossible. Our poor Garibaldi, hero as he is, and an honest hero, is in truth the weakest and most malleable of men, and had become at last the ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Volume II • Elizabeth Barrett Browning
... anything like Tolstoi!" cried the young man, laughing aloud at the idea, "for I don't take a bit of stock in his deification of working with your muscles. That was an exaggeration he fell into in his old age because he'd been denied his fair share of manual work when he was young. If he'd had to split kindlings and tote ashes and hoe corn when he was a boy, I bet he wouldn't have thought there was anything so sanctifying ...
— The Squirrel-Cage • Dorothy Canfield
... to convey the impression that there was no loss of time on Sedgwick's part. On the contrary, he might certainly have been more active in some of his movements. No doubt there were other general officers who would have been. But it is no exaggeration to insist that his dispositions were fully as speedy as those of any other portion of ...
— The Campaign of Chancellorsville • Theodore A. Dodge
... the United States. The change from the solid to the gaseous fuel has been made so rapidly, and has effected such marked results in both the processes of manufacture and the product, that it is no exaggeration to say that the eyes of the entire industrial world are turned with envious admiration upon the cities and neighborhoods blessed with so unique and valuable a fuel. The regions in which natural gas is found are for the most part coincident with the formations producing ...
— Burroughs' Encyclopaedia of Astounding Facts and Useful Information, 1889 • Barkham Burroughs
... entirely wanting in the state of nature, but only that they are not general enough, and, as against the passions, not strong enough to furnish a foundation for the edifice of the state. Not only exaggeration in statement but also uncouthness of thought may be forgiven the representative of a movement which is at once new and strengthened by the consciousness of agreement with a naturalistic theory of knowledge and physics; and the vigor of execution compels admiration, ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... country is but a different phase of his covetous self-love. Bimala's hero-worship of Sandip makes me hesitate all the more to talk to her about him, lest some touch of jealousy may lead me unwittingly into exaggeration. It may be that the pain at my heart is already making me see a distorted picture of Sandip. And yet it is better perhaps to speak out than to keep my feelings ...
— The Home and the World • Rabindranath Tagore
... battle, however, which I am after going to describe: that in which we and the O'Hallaghans had contrived, one way or other, to have the parish divided—one-half for them, and the other for us; and, upon my credibility, it is no exaggeration to declare that the whole parish, though ten miles by six, assembled itself in the town of Knockimdowny, upon this interesting occasion. In thruth, Ireland ought to be a land of mathemathitians; for I am sure her population is well trained, at ...
— The Ned M'Keown Stories - Traits And Stories Of The Irish Peasantry, The Works of - William Carleton, Volume Three • William Carleton
... a proclamation, which from one end to the other offends against truth. It has been published in many works. The season of the year for hostile landing is there very dexterously placed in the foreground; all the rest is a deceitful exaggeration. It must be observed that the proclamations which Bonaparte regarded as calculated to dazzle an ever too credulous public were amplifications often ridiculous and incomprehensible upon the spot, and which only excited the laughter of men of common ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne
... instance of the almost photographic accuracy of the poet's observation. The rippling undercurrent of satire is always there; but it is Chaucer's own peculiar satire—mellow, amused, uncondemning, the most subtle kind of satire, which does not depend upon exaggeration. The literary critic has only Chaucer's words and his own heart, or sometimes (low be it spoken) his own desire to be original, by which to guide his judgement. But the historian knows; he has all sorts of historical ...
— Medieval People • Eileen Edna Power
... deal of difference. A tarradiddle is what you say when you are, so to speak, took by surprise. It isn't a lie out and out; it's the truth concealed, I call it. Sometimes it is a mere exaggeration. You say a person is very, very cross when maybe that person is hardly cross at all. I can't quite explain, miss; I suppose there's scarcely any one who hasn't been guilty of a tarradiddle; ...
— Girls of the Forest • L. T. Meade
... he exaggerated the abuses and enormities of the Roman Catholic superstition which brought about the Reformation, nor the vast benefits which Luther conferred upon mankind by bringing them to light; both were so great, that they hardly admitted of exaggeration. His error—and, in the delineation of the progress of society in modern Europe, it was a very great one—consisted in overlooking the beneficial effect of that very superstition, then so pernicious, in a prior age of the world, when violence was universal, crime prevalent alike in high ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 350, December 1844 • Various
... as a result of the fall from his horse, he has some degree of retrograde amnesia and has invented details to fill the gaps in his memory, or could it be that writing, as he was, for his family and friends, he was indulging in a little pardonable exaggeration. ...
— The Memoirs of General the Baron de Marbot, Translated by - Oliver C. Colt • Baron de Marbot
... exceptional luck. The instant objection will be, that such luck is not exceptional, but represents the ordinary case. Let us consider. The reports are probably much exaggerated; and something of the same machinery for systematic exaggeration is already forming itself as operated so beneficially for California. As yet, however, it is not absolutely certain that the reports themselves, taken literally, would exactly countenance the romantic impressions drawn from ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. II (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... 55, estimated that from natural increase the population of Kentucky doubled every fifteen years,—probably an exaggeration. ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume One - From the Alleghanies to the Mississippi, 1769-1776 • Theodore Roosevelt
... had been said about any one particular thing as was said about this theatre, and where so many rumors were flying around, exaggeration as to the size, furnishing, and general appearance of the place could not be prevented. Some thought that an army of carpenters had been at work fitting up and decorating the whole theatre; others had it that it was upon the stage only that much labor had been expended, ...
— Left Behind - or, Ten Days a Newsboy • James Otis
... something like it, prevailed, especially among the Evangelicals, who were not like the Methodists, engaged in framing a new organization or in wrestling with the barbarous vices of the lower orders. No movement of the kind has ever been exempt from drawbacks and follies, from extravagance, exaggeration, breaches of good taste in religious matters, unctuousness, and cant—from chimerical attempts to get rid of the flesh and live an angelic life on earth—from delusions about special providences and miracles—from a tendency to over-value doctrine ...
— Cowper • Goldwin Smith
... they got into above the Cloudmaker must have been horrible. 'Why, there are places there you could put St. Paul's into, and that's no exaggeration, neither,' and they spent two nights in it. All the way down to the Gateway he says there were crevasses, great big fellows thirty feet across, which we of the First Return Party had crossed both going and coming back and which we never saw. ...
— The Worst Journey in the World, Volumes 1 and 2 - Antarctic 1910-1913 • Apsley Cherry-Garrard
... portraits of the English dramatists are wrought with great spirit and diligence. The account of Shakespeare may stand as a perpetual model of encomiastick criticism; exact without minuteness, and lofty without exaggeration. The praise lavished by Longinus, on the attestation of the heroes of Marathon by Demosthenes, fades away before it. In a few lines is exhibited a character, so extensive in its comprehension, and so curious in its ...
— Lives of the Poets, Vol. 1 • Samuel Johnson
... answer, when none might show where misrepresentation came in, where there was nothing given but the one side of the question, it was not difficult to make an excellent case against the accused. The early heretics, mostly unlettered people, always marred the purity of the cause by falling into exaggeration and foolishness, by denouncing what was good as well as what was corrupt in a system against which they were revolting—thus laying themselves open to attack and confutation, and alienating from them many who would ...
— The Secret Chamber at Chad • Evelyn Everett-Green
... and were dancing to the music produced by six fiddlers, when they were surrounded by a small army of disguised people, fired into, beaten and dispersed. The first accounts put the number of wounded at twenty, to-day they are reduced to five—perhaps that is the proportion of exaggeration in newspaper accounts of outrage generally. The newly-made bride and bridegroom went to see the wounded, leaving cordials and money ...
— The Letters of "Norah" on her Tour Through Ireland • Margaret Dixon McDougall
... marble. {33} After some of Mr. Friswell's deliverances, I am not disposed to rank his judgment very high; and I accept Lander's decision. As to the finish of the face, Mr. Fairholt's criticism is an exaggeration, successfully exposed by Mr. Friswell. My own opinion, telle quelle, has been already printed. {34} Allowing the bust to have been a recognisable, if not a staring likeness of the poet, I said and still say—"How awkward is the ensemble of the face! What a painful stare, with its goggle eyes and ...
— Shakespeare's Bones • C. M. Ingleby
... no exaggeration to say that Comstockery is the arch enemy of society. It seeks to make hypocrisy respectable; it would convert impurity into a basic virtue; it labels ignorance, innocence; it has legislated knowledge into a crime; and it seeks its perpetuation in the degradation ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 1, March 1906 • Various
... 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 ...
— Japan • David Murray
... the body and bushy tail against the air, which breaks their fall. Their bodies, and especially their bushy tails, have a curious tremulous motion, like the quiver of wings, as they come down. The flying squirrel's sailing down from a tree top to another tree, fifty feet away, is but an exaggeration, due to the membrane connecting the fore and hind legs, of what all squirrels practice continually. I have seen a red squirrel land lightly after jumping from an enormous height, and run away as ...
— Secret of the Woods • William J. Long
... upon the 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 the ...
— Some Christian Convictions - A Practical Restatement in Terms of Present-Day Thinking • Henry Sloane Coffin
... was so, and related his transactions with Captain Henderson, much of course to the father's relief, so far as the outer world was concerned; but what principally grieved him, besides the habits thus discovered, was his son's abject terror of him, not only in the exaggeration of illness, but in his mode of speaking ...
— Modern Broods • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... Church. It would give them so much pain that I shrink from trying to imagine it. They would look upon themselves as disgraced, and the whole family. My disappearance from the parish would ever do them harm—Eliza's school would suffer for sure. This may seem an exaggeration, but certainly Eliza would never quite get over it. If this way of escape had not been revealed to me, I don't think I ever should have found courage to leave, and if I didn't leave I should die. Life is so ordered that a trace remains of every act, but the trace is not always discovered, ...
— The Lake • George Moore
... And for all that I be eighty-one this Christmas, if I live to see the New Year in, I might be twenty-eight." She then very absurdly referred to the baby, who had waked up and made his presence felt, as to whether this was, or was not, an exaggeration, suggesting that he had roused himself to confirm it. Did he, she asked, want to say his great-Granny was as young as the best, and was he a blessed little cherub? She accommodated her pronunciation to ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... 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
... by. He went and fought for Christophe. In spite of his fear and dislike of fighting, in spite of his lucid and ironical mind, which scorned any sort of exaggeration in word and deed, when it came to defending Christophe he was far more violent than anybody else, and even than Christophe himself. He lost his head. Love makes a man irrational, and Olivier was no exception to the rule.—However, he was cleverer than Christophe. ...
— Jean Christophe: In Paris - The Market-Place, Antoinette, The House • Romain Rolland
... of Kent and of the Princess Victoire Marie Louise of Saxe-Coburg Saalfield, widow of Prince Charles of Leiningen. Edward, Duke of Kent, was the fourth and altogether the best son of George III. Making all allowance for the exaggeration of loyal biographers, I should say he was an amiable, able, and upright man, generous and charitable to a remarkable degree, for a royal Prince of that time—perhaps too much so, for he kept himself poor and died poor. He was ...
— Queen Victoria, her girlhood and womanhood • Grace Greenwood
... would be about 1670. From 1665 to 1673, bachelors in Canada underwent a martyrdom of great severity, and Jules' fear lest he find himself married in spite of himself is hardly an exaggeration. From 1665 to 1673, about one thousand girls were sent out from France to find husbands in Canada. Each couple married was given an ox, a cow, a pair of swine, a pair of fowls, two barrels of salted meat, and eleven ...
— Fleurs de lys and other poems • Arthur Weir
... guiding and governing and inspiring His Church, which He does, if you ask for the supply of your need He would put that work aside for a moment, if necessary, to attend to you. That is no exaggeration; it is only a strong way of putting the plain truth that Christ's love individualises each of its objects; and lavishes itself upon each one of us; as if there were no other beings in the universe ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... Bryant inveighed so justly. The market is flooded with this fruit because it bears transportation about as well as would marbles. Yes, they are strawberries; choke-pears and Seckels belong to the same species. There is truth enough in my exaggeration to warrant the assertion that if we would enjoy the possible strawberry, we must raise it ourselves, and pick it when fully matured—ready for the table, and not for market. Then any man's garden can furnish something better than was found ...
— The Home Acre • E. P. Roe
... justice to Belgium, I must tell some of the least dreadful of the things I have seen and only those that have come to me through personal experience. I do not tell from hearsay, and I tell the truth without exaggeration. ...
— Private Peat • Harold R. Peat
... reader the play does not appear so bad as the event indicated. The first act is conceded to be a model; and, in spite of confused interests and some wildly romantic speeches, the whole presents a vivid picture of siege horrors, without melodrama or exaggeration. Possibly the failure was due to the fact that doctor Nomdedeu, the chief character, places his daughter's health ahead of patriotism, and to the final tableau, in which the defeated Spaniards lay down their arms ...
— Heath's Modern Language Series: Mariucha • Benito Perez Galdos
... the resources of our material civilization; admitting it to be possible that the founders of the Royal Society themselves looked for no other reward than this, I cannot confess that I was guilty of exaggeration when I hinted, that to him who had the gift of distinguishing between prominent events and important events, the origin of a combined effort on the part of mankind to improve natural knowledge might have loomed larger than the Plague and have outshone the glare of the Fire; ...
— Lay Sermons, Addresses and Reviews • Thomas Henry Huxley
... his writing at all is that he shall present a brief, reasoned, and memorable view. By the necessity of the case, all the more neutral circumstances are omitted from his narrative; and that of itself, by the negative exaggeration of which I have spoken in the text, lends to the matter in hand a certain false and specious glitter. By the necessity of the case, again, he is forced to view his subject throughout in a particular illumination, like a studio artifice. ...
— Familiar Studies of Men & Books • Robert Louis Stevenson
... proposed, and he saw that he had indeed gone a great way on the generous side of equity. There was something very fine and noble in this conduct, something that harmonized well with his own heart and feelings. There was no exaggeration, no romance about it: he spoke in the tone of a man of business doing a right thing well considered, and the Baronet was satisfied in every respect but one. Mrs. Hazleton's words I must not say had created a suspicion, ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 3, February, 1851 • Various
... that the pictures they draw both of heathenism and of Christianity are coloured by their likes and dislikes. But it is well to learn from an enemy, and caricatures may often be useful in calling attention to features which would escape notice but for exaggeration. So we may profit by even the ill-natured and distorted likenesses of ourselves as contrasted with the adherents of other religions which so many 'liberal-minded' writers of travels delight ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren
... understand the situation and planned to beat their rivals at their own game. They sent out into the country and secured two men with phenomenal voices. It was said, with playful exaggeration, that these two men could shout so as to be heard across Lake Michigan. They were made captains of two stentorian bands of followers. These were placed on opposite sides of the auditorium and were instructed to raise the shout ...
— The Life of Abraham Lincoln • Henry Ketcham
... in the philosophical and religious domains are generally found to be nothing but the exaggeration, or the minimising, of a truth, very much as evil, physical and moral, is often the privation of a corresponding good, the absence of something which ought to be present. Year by year the vast majority of religionists in this Western world are seriously engaged in the commemoration of a transcendent ...
— Morality as a Religion - An exposition of some first principles • W. R. Washington Sullivan
... 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 carefully ...
— History of the Donner Party • C.F. McGlashan
... all the energy of his impassioned nature into his appeals. In commenting upon the delinquencies of public officials he did not mince matters, though I search in vain throughout his voluminous writings for any evidence that he was ever guilty of a misstatement, or even an exaggeration. He regaled his readers and hearers with indubitable facts—facts which, for the most part, were easily susceptible of proof, and which were eminently calculated to arouse public indignation against the harpies who reaped where they had sowed not, ...
— The Story of the Upper Canada Rebellion, Volume 1 • John Charles Dent
... envies his friend William, who at Steyn in the little cell can write beautiful poetry, favoured by his 'lucky stars'. It befits him, Erasmus, only to weep and sigh; it has already so dulled his mind and withered his heart that his former studies no longer appeal to him. There is rhetorical exaggeration in this and we shall not take his pining for the monastery too seriously, but still it is clear that deep dejection had mastered him. Contact with the world of politics and ambition had probably unsettled Erasmus. ...
— Erasmus and the Age of Reformation • Johan Huizinga
... 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 ...
— Thoughts on Man - His Nature, Productions and Discoveries, Interspersed with - Some Particulars Respecting the Author • William Godwin
... the redundancy of its upper protuberances if it were not for the enormous girth of its round towers, which appear to give it a robust lateral development. These towers, however, fine as they are in their way, struck me as a little stupid; they are the exaggeration of an exaggeration. In a building erected after the days of defence and proclaiming its peaceful character from its hundred embroideries and cupolas, they seem to indicate a want of invention. I shall risk the accusation ...
— A Little Tour in France • Henry James
... too), practically behave as if the scientific end were the only one in view, or as if the sick body were but a reservoir for stowing medicines into, and the surgical disease only a curious case the sufferer has made for the attendant's special information. This is really no exaggeration. You think, if you suspected your patient was being poisoned, say, by a copper kettle, you would instantly, as you ought, cut off all possible connection between him and the suspected source of injury, without regard to the ...
— Notes on Nursing - What It Is, and What It Is Not • Florence Nightingale
... that you 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 slight ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... Not only have the Romans made contributions of large numbers of words to the English language, but they have added to it a quite new quality, and given to its genius new powers of expression. So true is this, that we may say— without any sense of unfairness, or any feeling of exaggeration— that, until the Latin element was thoroughly mixed, united with, and transfused into the original English, the writings of Shakespeare were impossible, the poetry of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries could not have come ...
— A Brief History of the English Language and Literature, Vol. 2 (of 2) • John Miller Dow Meiklejohn
... present editor to know that they had amused. That is why they are printed here, and also to show the kind of reading prepared for the childhood of our great-grandmothers and great-grandfathers. In those days exaggeration was rather in favour with story-tellers; and we therefore need not believe that there was ever a family quite so bad as the Bad Family in this book, or a Good Family so good; or that Mrs. Loft (in 'The ...
— The Bad Family and Other Stories • Mrs. Fenwick
... Your aunt and myself looked at each other with ludicrous satisfaction when we came to taste coffee, which happened to be precisely at the same instant. It was the first time either of us had ever tasted French coffee—it would scarcely be exaggeration to say, that either of us had ever tasted coffee at all. I have had many French cooks since; have lived years in the capital of France itself, but I could never yet obtain a servant who understood ...
— Recollections of Europe • J. Fenimore Cooper
... an agnostic, wrote, severely: "I regret the popularity of Robert Elsmere in this country. Our Western people are like sheep in such matters. They will not see that the book was written for a people with a State Church on its hands, so that a gross exaggeration of the importance of religion was necessary. It will revive interest in theology and retard the progress ...
— A Writer's Recollections (In Two Volumes), Volume II • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... judge of distance, of time, of numbers. He must be able to tell at a glance whether a cloud of dust is caused by moving troops or by the action of the elements. Above all, he must be truthful, not given to exaggeration of his friends' strength or his enemy's weakness. When he makes his report it should need no corroboration. If a scout is worth his salt, his advice should be ...
— Campaign Pictures of the War in South Africa (1899-1900) - Letters from the Front • A. G. Hales
... draft of the Kentucky resolutions of 1798 is made the basis of Von Holst's contention that he was the father of the doctrine of nullification. This, however, is something of an exaggeration. He is more accurate when he refers to the doctrine as being as old as the Constitution itself and the outgrowth of the circumstances of the time. The prevalent conception of the state as a check upon the Federal government derived support, as we have seen, ...
— The Spirit of American Government - A Study Of The Constitution: Its Origin, Influence And - Relation To Democracy • J. Allen Smith
... kings, in the fifth century. Be that as it may, its authentic history had been extensive before Abelard assumed the direction of its affairs. His gruesome picture of the conditions which prevailed there cannot, of course, be accepted as wholly accurate, but even allowing for gross exaggeration, the life of the monks must have been quite sufficiently scandalous. It was apparently in the closing period of Abelard's sojourn at the abbey of St. Gildas that he wrote the "Historia Calamitatum." He endured the life there for nearly ten years; the date of his flight is not ...
— Historia Calamitatum • Peter Abelard
... not of Russia, for among its citizens, we are told, possibly with exaggeration, more than one-third (70,000) are Jews, besides 10,000 Greeks and Germans, and Italians in good number. It is unlike any other Russian city, for it is tolerably well paved, has plenty of drinking-water, and rows of trees—however stunted, wind-nipped, and sickly—in every street. It is not Russian, ...
— Russia - As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Various
... result of years of close observation and study. Its method is admirable, the induction is broad and reliable, while the conclusions drawn in most cases are both rigorously logical and avoid even the suspicion of exaggeration. We predict a high place in the annals of biological science will yet be assigned to this admirable ...
— The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought • Alexander F. Chamberlain
... There may, on various occasions, have been some small dereliction of duty. But you'll have been observing that in the recent exposition of my philosophy I have not laboured the point of duty to disproportionate exaggeration." ...
— The Rough Road • William John Locke
... pure, and Christian course those forty years of poverty, with his blasphemous and infidel career for the one bad week of wealth, he had no patience with himself—only felt his fall the greater; and his judgment of his own guilt, with a natural exaggeration, went the length of saying—I am scarcely less guilty before God and man, than if, indeed, my hands were red with murder, and my casual finding had been robbery. He would make no strong appeals to the bar of justice, as an innocent condemned; ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... until the restoration of order restored to the house-owners the means of asserting the rights of property. The following graphic and lively description of the agitation, incited and fostered under such circumstances, is no exaggeration:—"The past week has been the calmest which we have had since the revolution. We have had no forced illuminations, no planting of trees of liberty, no physical-force demonstrations, no great display of any kind; in fact, we have been decidedly ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... a long habit of deceiving others we finish by deceiving ourselves. He who feels no compassion for the distresses of his neighbour, knows that such indifference is not very estimable; he therefore studies to disguise the coldness of his heart by the exaggeration of his language, and supplies, by an affected excess of sentiment, the total absence of it.—The gods have not (as you know) made me poetical, nor do I often tax your patience with a simile, but I think this French sensibility is to genuine feeling, what their paste is to the diamond—it ...
— A Residence in France During the Years 1792, 1793, 1794 and 1795, • An English Lady
... vagaries of fancy, but with the strength of manhood he acquired that exalted purity which springs from great thoughts. He never had anything to do with the vulgar feelings. He lived, spoke and acted as if bad people did not exist; and when he portrayed them in his works, it was with more exaggeration and less depth than if he had known them. The bad presented themselves to his mind as an obstacle, ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... excessive issues of faith money (or check money) which are the ever-present danger of England, America, and other monometallic countries; and as a result, they have almost entirely escaped those fearful convulsions have that threatened the political stability of great nations. In fact, it is no exaggeration to say that France has only felt the convulsions of recent years by their reflex action on her from other countries; and twice within very recent years has the Bank of England been compelled to go ...
— If Not Silver, What? • John W. Bookwalter
... 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 International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... burlesque the lighter colloquiality, and it is only in the more serious and most tragical junctures that his people utter themselves with veracious simplicity and dignity. That great, burly fancy of his is always tempting him to the exaggeration which is the condition of so much of his personal humor, but which when it invades the drama spoils the illusion. The illusion renews itself in the great moments, but I wish it could be kept intact in the small, and I blame him that he does not rule ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... This ain't no exaggeration. I have good reason for sayin' that most of the Anarchists in this city today are men who ran up against civil service examinations. Isn't it enough to make a man sour on his country when he wants to serve it and won't be allowed unless he answers a lot ...
— Plunkitt of Tammany Hall • George Washington Plunkitt
... the other hand, can hardly find words strong enough to express his contempt for the "blare and brassiness" of Byron; but that also is an exaggeration. Though Byron is no longer a popular hero, and though his work is more rhetorical than poetical, we may still gladly acknowledge the swinging rhythm, the martial dash and vigor of his best verse. Also, remembering the Revolution, we may ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... 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 would probably ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, No. 23, February, 1873, Vol. XI. • Various
... of country is but a different phase of his covetous self-love. Bimala's hero-worship of Sandip makes me hesitate all the more to talk to her about him, lest some touch of jealousy may lead me unwittingly into exaggeration. It may be that the pain at my heart is already making me see a distorted picture of Sandip. And yet it is better perhaps to speak out than to keep my feelings gnawing ...
— The Home and the World • Rabindranath Tagore
... Duchess; the frank, good- natured Madame Colonna; that deeply interesting enigma the Princess Lucretia; and the gentle Flora. He thought with disgust of the impending dissipation of an University, which could only be an exaggeration of their coarse frolics at school. It seemed rather vapid this mighty Cambridge, over which they had so often talked in the playing fields of Eton, with such anticipations of its vast and absorbing interest. And those University honours that once ...
— Coningsby • Benjamin Disraeli
... highfaluting[obs3]; hot air, spread-eagleism [obs3][U. S.]; brag, braggardism[obs3]; bravado, bunkum, buncombe; jactitation[obs3], jactancy[obs3]; bounce; venditation|, vaporing, rodomontade, bombast, fine talking, tall talk, magniloquence, teratology|, heroics; Chauvinism; exaggeration &c. 549. vanity &c. 880; vox et praeterea nihil[Lat]; much cry and little wool, brutum fulmen[Lat]. exultation; gloriation|, glorification; flourish of trumpets; triumph &c. 883. boaster; braggart, braggadocio; Gascon[Fr], fanfaron[obs3], pretender, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... historical evidence. It is not the business of a preacher to tell the whole truth in one discourse. He is not a witness in the box; he is a prophet aiming at some special moral reform. If a Bishop is lecturing his Brethren for their failings he is sure to indulge, not exactly in exaggeration, but in one-sided statements of the facts. He will talk at length about the sins, and say nothing about the virtues. It is, of course, within the bounds of possibility that when the Brethren became more prosperous they were not so strict in some ...
— History of the Moravian Church • J. E. Hutton
... later, Mons. MARIUS, who, as the French sporting nobleman, in Family Ties, in love with an English "Mees," and so proud of his English slang, was simply the character to the life, without any more exaggeration than was artistically necessary. On "the Spindle Side," Miss LILY HANBURY looks handsome, and is generally fairly well-suited; Miss PATTIE BROWNE has the most difficult part of the three, and it is not to be wondered ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, April 29, 1893 • Various
... and legitimate and frequently practised measure of warfare "a war of starvation" against women and children is a good deal of an exaggeration. Though inconvenienced, you are very far from the danger of starvation. Indeed, all your spokesmen not only admit this fact but defiantly ...
— Right Above Race • Otto Hermann Kahn
... Is the plea of necessity made out? The answer may be given without hesitation. It is not. The allegations on which the whole train of reasoning rests are tainted by exaggeration or misapprehension, and the allegations, even if taken as true, do not establish the required inference; the premises are unsound, and the premises do not ...
— A Leap in the Dark - A Criticism of the Principles of Home Rule as Illustrated by the - Bill of 1893 • A.V. Dicey
... familiarities. There are likewise Other beauties of composition which he will not fail to pursue;—such as brevity where the subject requires it;—a lively and pathetic description of important occurrences;—a passionate exaggeration of remarkable circumstances;—an earnestness of expression which implies more than is said;—a well-timed variety of humour;—and a happy imitation of different characters and dispositions. Assisted and adorned by such figures as these, which are very numerous, the force of Eloquence will appear ...
— Cicero's Brutus or History of Famous Orators; also His Orator, or Accomplished Speaker. • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... that after all she was rather an unpoetical personage than otherwise—a coarse-minded old maid, half prude, half coquette, whose better part was mannish, and all that belonged to her sex a ludicrous exaggeration of its weaknesses. But meanwhile, they overlook the fact, that not the woman Elizabeth, but the Virgin-queen, the royal heroine, is the theme of admiration. Not the petty virtues, the pretty sensibilities, the cheap charity, the prim decorum, which modern flatterers dwell upon, degrading ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 17, No. 483., Saturday, April 2, 1831 • Various
... better families of Rome, and resisted nobly. The stoic school produced the lofty characters of Cremutius Cordus, Thraseas, Arria, Helvidius Priscus, Annaeus Cornutus, and Musonius Rufus, admirable masters of aristocratic virtue. The rigidity and exaggeration of this school arose from the horrible cruelty of the Caesars. The continual thought of a good man was how to inure himself to suffering, and prepare himself for death. Lucian, in bad taste, and Persius ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VIII (of X) - Continental Europe II. • Various
... who are otherwise sympathetic to Socialism denounce this doctrine as narrow, brutal, and productive of antisocialistic feelings of class hatred. Upon all hands the doctrine is condemned as an un-American appeal to passion and a wicked exaggeration of social conditions. When President Roosevelt attacks the preachers of the doctrine, and wrathfully condemns class-consciousness as "a foul thing," he doubtless expresses the views of a majority of American citizens. The insistence of Socialists upon this aspect of their propaganda ...
— Socialism - A Summary and Interpretation of Socialist Principles • John Spargo
... a shining light in every position he had filled from his boyhood upwards. He was a very great genius. Everyone knew this; they said, indeed, that he was one of the few people to whom the word genius could be applied without exaggeration. Had he not taken I don't know how many University Scholarships in his freshman's year? Had he not been afterwards Senior Wrangler, First Chancellor's Medallist and I do not know how many more things besides? And then, he was such a wonderful speaker; ...
— The Way of All Flesh • Samuel Butler
... Turner, he learnt to see that, lying intermingled with all the power and nobility of much of his work, there was a displeasing extravagance, a violence, a faultiness of detail, an exaggeration that often ruined his pictures. Neither he nor Claude were true to life; but there was an insolence sometimes about Turner's variation from fact, which made him shudder. How he seemed sometimes, in his pictures of places familiar to Hugh—such, for instance, as the drawing of Malham Cove—to ...
— Beside Still Waters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... was so dreadful that, as he lay for a few minutes with his eyes closed, he could say without exaggeration that he had never felt anything so sickening in his life. It was worse than the blue funk that attended the reveille for his first battle—worse than the bluer remorse that had come with the dawn after some of his more youthful ...
— The Street Called Straight • Basil King
... 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 ...
— A Sportsman's Sketches - Volume II • Ivan Turgenev
... the sailors on the accomplishments of the new-comer, and on the effects especially of lyddite, about which we hear so much. One must allow for a little friendly exaggeration, but if the mixture of truth is in any decent proportion, I should say that spades to bury dead Boers with are all the weapons that the rest of us will require in future. The gun uses shrapnel as well, but relies for its ...
— With Rimington • L. March Phillipps
... then, of the irritation produced by such privations, and the impossibility of relieving them by such inadequate payment; also whether it is possible to maintain order and discipline amongst men worse circumstanced than the convicts of Algiers! Under such circumstances, it is no exaggeration to affirm that confidence will be for ever gone, and the squadron entirely ruined, if measures of preservation are not ...
— Narrative of Services in the Liberation of Chili, Peru and Brazil, - from Spanish and Portuguese Domination, Volume 1 • Thomas Cochrane, Tenth Earl of Dundonald
... they made in their throats. Mr. McKinlay put little faith in the story; and I was vexed to hear by the next report from him that he was not hastening to the rescue. But it would then have been too late. The white men alluded to were, unquestionably, Burke, my son, and King, with exaggeration as to their being without clothes, ...
— Successful Exploration Through the Interior of Australia • William John Wills
... more than a pardonable exaggeration to say that the determination of the meaning of nature reduces itself principally to the discussion of the character of time and the character of space. In succeeding lectures I shall explain my own view of time and space. I shall endeavour to show that they are abstractions from more ...
— The Concept of Nature - The Tarner Lectures Delivered in Trinity College, November 1919 • Alfred North Whitehead
... valley of death." To the left were everlasting limestone hills, one of them topped by the ruined reputed tomb of Samuel—all trenched, cross-trenched and war-scarred, but covered now in a Joseph's coat of flowers, blue, blood-red, yellow and white. [* This is no exaggeration. There are actually millions, and on more than one continent, whose dearest wish, could they have it, would be to see Jerusalem ...
— Jimgrim and Allah's Peace • Talbot Mundy
... from Europe wearing the first tight skirt that Chippewa had ever seen, Tessie gave an imitation of that advanced young woman's progress down Grand Avenue in this restricting garment. The thing was cruel in its fidelity, though containing just enough exaggeration to make it artistic. She followed it up by imitating the stricken look on the face of Mattie Haynes, cloak-and-suit buyer at Megan's, who, having just returned from the East with what she considered the most fashionable of ...
— One Basket • Edna Ferber
... gambling hell, the wail of the unemployed, the hatred of the church by countless men who see in it only great piles of costly stone and upholstered furniture and the minister as a luxurious idler, all the vast tumult of this vast torrent of humanity with its false and its true ideas, its exaggeration of evils in the church and its bitterness and shame that are the result of many complex causes, all this as a total fact in its contrast with the easy, comfortable life I have lived, fills me more and more with a sense ...
— In His Steps • Charles M. Sheldon
... middle-aged, and the young; but, unlike every other group, it must contain the capacity to present, in a concrete image, each elemental type of human nature, and to reproduce, with the delicate exaggeration essential to dramatic art, every species of person; in order that all human life—whether of the street, the dwelling, the court, the camp, man in his common joys and sorrows, his vices, crimes, miseries, his loftiest aspirations and most ideal state—may be so copied that the picture ...
— Shadows of the Stage • William Winter
... 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 ...
— Wives and Daughters • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... overwhelmed by the final attack of insanity. "Every line is instinct with a profound and chastened feeling, to which it would be difficult to find a parallel. There is not a phrase, not a word, which jars upon the most susceptible ear, not a tinge of exaggeration, not a touch that is excessive. The fact that he who gave forth these supreme utterances of filial love was old himself when he did it, brings into the relationship a strange, tender equality which is ...
— Six Centuries of English Poetry - Tennyson to Chaucer • James Baldwin
... be, perhaps, an exaggeration: but when people resort to a theatre to unbend, or relax, they will hardly think their pleasure tastelesly diversified by a fine pantomime execution of a dramatic composition, to the perfection of which, poetry, music, ...
— A Treatise on the Art of Dancing • Giovanni-Andrea Gallini
... Strangers passing beneath the schoolroom window at a moment when the sisters were assembled together, had indeed been known to estimate the numbers present as from a dozen to twenty; but such a statement was obviously false, and tended to that painful habit of exaggeration which it is the duty of all good folk to deplore. They were girls of strong individuality, and each felt it a duty to state her own views on any given subject, which she proceeded to do, undaunted by the fact that her companions were too much engrossed in talking ...
— A Houseful of Girls • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... and with much exaggeration of what he had done and what he could do, and began pushing off the boat ...
— The Mormon Prophet • Lily Dougall
... 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 violence is nothing to the purpose. ...
— Shelley - An Essay • Francis Thompson
... perhaps you may not know, is, without any exaggeration, the most delightful paper in the world. It contains nothing that one dislikes to read about, such as accidents, murders, suicides, politics, and criticisms of concerts; it contains nothing whatever of such things, while, ...
— The Slowcoach • E. V. Lucas
... by bringing them near, and putting them in their hands, and turning them about, we accustom them never to heed them at all: and so we by bringing reason to bear on it may discover the rottenness and emptiness and exaggeration of our fancy. As a case in point let us take your present exile from what you deem your country. For in nature no country, or house, or field, or smithy, as Aristo said, or surgery, is peculiarly ours, but all such things exist or rather take their name in connection with the person who dwells ...
— Plutarch's Morals • Plutarch
... through red haze. Distances that had formerly been clearly outlined were now dim, obscured. The yawning chasm was not the same. It circled wider, redder, deeper. It was a weird, ghastly mouth of hell. Gale stood fascinated, unable to tell how much he saw was real, how much exaggeration of overwrought emotions. There was no beauty here, but an unparalleled grandeur, a sublime scene of devastation and desolation which might have had its counterpart upon the burned-out moon. The mood that gripped Gale now added to its somber portent ...
— Desert Gold • Zane Grey
... fill a volume with anecdotes and adventures in which the black bear figures as the hero. Many stories of his peculiar habits are related in the back settlements of America, some of which are true, while others partake largely of exaggeration. We have not room for these, however; and I have given you only facts, such as will enable you to form some idea of the general ...
— The Boy Hunters • Captain Mayne Reid
... circumstance which caused him to take a northward route from Hungary for his attack upon Gaul. The muster of the Hunnish hosts was swollen by warriors of every tribe that they had subjugated; nor is there any reason to suspect the old chroniclers of wilful exaggeration in estimating Attila's army as seven hundred thousand strong. Having crossed the Rhine probably a little below Coblentz, he defeated the king of the Burgundians, who endeavored to bar his progress. He then divided his vast forces into two armies, ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 4 • Various
... popular thing of which Dickens is accused, that of exaggeration. Many people are quite incredulous that there could ever have existed such a character as Little Nell. Chesterton, however, thinks that Dickens did know a girl of this nature, and that Little Nell was based on her. Little Nell is not ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... tragedy of "Cato," and his "Essays" contributed principally to the "Tatler" and the "Spectator." The excellent style of his essays, their genial wit and sprightly humor, made them conspicuous in an age when coarseness, bitterness, and exaggeration deformed the writings of the most eminent: and these characteristics have given them an unquestioned place among the classics of ...
— McGuffey's Sixth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... 1797 and 1798 are generally and justly regarded as the blossoming-time of Coleridge's poetic genius. It would be scarcely an exaggeration to say that they were even more than this, and that within the brief period covered by them is included not only the development of the poet's powers to their full maturity but the untimely beginnings of their decline. For to pass from the poems written by Coleridge within these two years to those ...
— English Men of Letters: Coleridge • H. D. Traill
... It is no exaggeration to say that the best men and the best minds in England, without distinction of rank or class, are now laboring for the advancement of the people. They see, what has never been so clearly seen before, that the nation is a unit, that the welfare of each depends ultimately on the welfare of ...
— The Leading Facts of English History • D.H. Montgomery
... cent clear profit, or that the aggregate of the exports cited yields at that rate. Twenty per cent on exports to China and the East Indies, in view of the more than double distance, and increase of risk attendant, does not seem proportionally liable to the same appearance of exaggeration. Under favourable circumstances returns cannot be looked for in less than a year on the average, and then the greater distance the greater the risk of all kinds. Classifying the exports upon this legitimate system, we find that, in round numbers, not very far from eight-ninths of the total amount ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 337, November, 1843 • Various
... of Bullen was always a pleasure, but still greater was my delight in the discovery of one of whom I may now say without exaggeration that he has become one of the leading men of letters of our time. The author I mean is Mr. Walter De La Mare. My friend, Mr. Ingpen, who was then on the staff of Smith & Elder, and was detailed to help me in getting up and ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... a number of years in the United States, of which (then comparatively little known) part of the world she used to tell us stories that, from her characteristic exaggeration, we always received with extreme incredulity; but my own experience, subsequent by many years to hers, has corroborated her marvelous histories of flights of birds that almost darkened the sun (i.e. ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... picture of vice and profligacy was drawn by one whose love of truth rendered him incapable of deceit or of exaggeration. It was published at the time, and was unanswered, because unanswerable. It was not painted from imagination by an ascetic; but from life by an enlightened observer—not by the poor preaching mechanic when incarcerated ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... stopped the Persian invasion of Europe, which would doubtless have resulted in changing the current of literature from that orderly and stately course which it had taken from its fountain in a Greek Parnassus, and diverted it into the thousand brawling rills of Persian fancy and exaggeration. ...
— Persian Literature, Volume 1,Comprising The Shah Nameh, The - Rubaiyat, The Divan, and The Gulistan • Anonymous
... things, the golden mean of the Greeks, Confucius' and Gautama's law of measure. It proposes to bring the primitive and sensual element in man under critical control; to accomplish this it relies chiefly upon its amiable exaggeration of the reasonableness of human nature. But the Socratic dictum that knowledge is virtue was the product of a personality distinguished, if we accept the dialogues of Plato, by a perfect harmony of thought and feeling. ...
— Preaching and Paganism • Albert Parker Fitch
... Is this exaggeration? Witness now, Ye far backwoodsmen—much too oft belied, Are ye inclined these things to disavow? Or will my statements be by you denied? If not they stand for truth both far and wide, And your example may be found of use In leading ...
— The Emigrant Mechanic and Other Tales In Verse - Together With Numerous Songs Upon Canadian Subjects • Thomas Cowherd
... where their victims would be found, and the exact position of the bullet-holes which had caused their death; for with the telescope-rifle the question is not, whether an enemy shall be hit, but what particular feature of his face, or which button of his coat shall be the target. That this is no exaggeration may be easily proved by the indisputable evidence of hundreds of targets, every shot in which may be covered by the palm of the hand, though fired from a distance at which no unassisted eye could possibly discern the object ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 59, September, 1862 • Various
... minstrel, finding the taste and ferocity of the Thafurs commemorated in the historical accounts of the Holy Wars, has ascribed their practices and propensities to the Monarch of England, whose ferocity was considered as an object of exaggeration ...
— The Talisman • Sir Walter Scott
... Darvid, with a slight smile. "I observe more and more that exaggeration is a disease in my family. I should prefer simple speech ...
— The Argonauts • Eliza Orzeszko (AKA Orzeszkowa)
... inventor," reported the 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 have unquestionably amounted ...
— History of the Great American Fortunes, Vol. I - Conditions in Settlement and Colonial Times • Myers Gustavus
... so," he said; "but, you see, Renny, we New Yorkers live in such an atmosphere of exaggeration that if I did not put it strongly it wouldn't have any effect. You've got to give a big dose to a man who has been taking poison all his life. They will take off ninety per cent. from any statement I make, anyhow; so, you see, I have to pile it up pretty high before ...
— In the Midst of Alarms • Robert Barr
... is the effect of wasted cleverness, that it disheartens a man who, knowing that his abilities are less, finds the achievement of cleverer men so poor in what satisfies the artist of feeling. In it I saw an exaggeration of Pyne's defects and the caricature of his good qualities. Creswick had a better feeling for nature, but convention in his methods gave place to trick, and I remember his showing me the way in which he produced detail in a pebbly brookside, ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume I • Stillman, William James
... remains a perpetual type of the hero of romance, the double hero, in the field of action and the realm of the spirit. Had he lived in an earlier age he would now be a mythological personage; and even without the looming exaggeration and glamour of myth he still imposes. The men of to-day seem all of little stature, and less consequence, beside the gigantic creature who made his way with equal address and audacity in courts and ...
— The Closet of Sir Kenelm Digby Knight Opened • Kenelm Digby
... looked him all over with a clinical eye. A far more stupid man than Dr. Gregory might have guessed the truth; but ninety-nine out of a hundred, even if they had been equally inclined to kindness, would have blundered by some touch of charitable exaggeration. The doctor was better inspired. He knew the father well; in that white face of intelligence and suffering, he divined something of the son; and he told, without apology or adornment, ...
— Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... often exaggerated by the admirers of one side or the other. A hundred people write as if Sophocles had no mysticism and practically speaking no conscience. Half a dozen retort as if St. Paul had no public spirit and no common sense. I have protested often against this exaggeration; but, stated reasonably, as a change of proportion and not a creation of new hearts, the antithesis is certainly based on fact. The historical reasons for it are suggested above, in the first ...
— Five Stages of Greek Religion • Gilbert Murray
... pioneers of positive science, who left a great and priceless legacy to modern civilisation. The importance of this event (the foundation of the Museion), says Draper, in his Intellectual Development of Europe, though hitherto little understood, admits of no exaggeration so far as the intellectual progress of Europe is concerned. The Museum made an impression upon the intellectual career of Europe so powerful and enduring that we still enjoy its results. If the purely literary productions of that age have sometimes been ...
— History Of Egypt From 330 B.C. To The Present Time, Volume 10 (of 12) • S. Rappoport
... Lady Mary 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 ...
— Old Lady Mary - A Story of the Seen and the Unseen • Margaret O. (Wilson) Oliphant
... parsonage. There she was surrounded by her family of half-fed and half-clothed children, with none of the alleviations which made her husband's life not only bearable but often enjoyable. It is no exaggeration to say that the wives of our early preachers often suffered for want of nourishing food, while, when on his circuit, the husband had abundance. Besides this there was the absence of almost every domestic and social ...
— The Heroic Women of Early Indiana Methodism: An Address Delivered Before the Indiana Methodist Historical Society • Thomas Aiken Goodwin
... 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 ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... perfecting himself in his calling and preparing for wider fields. Then he acted the rollicking Irishman to perfection; the real live Yankee, with his genuine mannerisms and dialect, with proper spirit and without ridiculous exaggeration, and the Negro, so open to burlesque. The special charm of his acting in those characters was his artistic execution. He never stooped to vulgarities, his humor was quaint and spontaneous, and the entire absence of apparent ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1 • Various
... what are you going to have M. Paul think, that you were born under a bridge?" said the good Crenmitz, who could not accustom herself to the exaggeration of certain metaphors, and ...
— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet
... honour of us a fifth course was added to the customary four. But the charm of the meal consisted, not in the number, but in the superiority of the dishes, and not less in the absence of the attendants, who, not belonging to the society at table, necessarily are a disturbing element. I may say, without exaggeration, that I have seldom seen a meal so excellently prepared, and never one consisting of such choice material. The flesh of young oxen fattened upon the aromatic pastures of the higher hills and of the tame antelopes cannot be matched anywhere ...
— Freeland - A Social Anticipation • Theodor Hertzka
... lawyer probed into the mass of corruption Bivens had placed in his hands the more profound became his surprise. At first he was inclined to scout the whole story as an exaggeration invented in the fierce fight ...
— The Root of Evil • Thomas Dixon
... of something hidden beneath it. In a moment the hand reappeared, holding a chalk drawing very neatly framed. It was Madonna's copy from the head of the Venus de' Medici—the same copy which Zack had honored with his most superlative exaggeration of praise, at his last visit to the studio. She had not since forgotten, or altered her purpose of making him a present of the drawing which he had admired so much. It had been finished with the utmost care and completeness which she could ...
— Hide and Seek • Wilkie Collins
... all of them. Perhaps Father Laughter wanted to take a sly dig or two at the yarns some travelers tell when they get home. By this means the story illustrates one of the great sources of humor—monstrous exaggeration. It also shows what a foolish thing it is to be a boaster. Most people, at one time or another, are tempted to brag about their deeds, their possessions, or their smartness. If they would only think of Baron Munchausen, they ...
— The Elson Readers, Book 5 • William H. Elson and Christine M. Keck
... those now living and which are known to us only by their fossilized remains. How far this doctrine is well based, how far, on the other hand, as our knowledge at present stands, it is an overstatement of the real facts of the case, and an exaggeration of the conclusions fairly deducible from them, are points of grave importance, but into the discussion of which I do not, at present, propose to enter. It is enough that such a view of the relations of extinct to living beings has been propounded, to lead us to inquire, with anxiety, how ...
— On Some Fossil Remains of Man • Thomas H. Huxley
... told, that they had sent orders to make a formal demand of Longchamps from Congress, and had immediately countermanded these orders. You know whether this be true. If it be, I should suspect the first orders to have been surprised from them by some exaggeration, and that the latter was a correction of their error, in the moment of further reflection. Upon the whole, there certainly appears to me no reason to urge the State, in which the fact happened, to any violation of their laws, nor to set a precedent which might hereafter ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... of me! I am not half so black as they allege. You know, exaggeration is to them What whiskey is to most men. But time bursts Their bubbles—or at least we come to take Their work as merely art. Thus their description As art is not so bad; but if you seek For ...
— Mr. Faust • Arthur Davison Ficke
... be mad exaggeration to say we camped. Wet to the skin—dirty to the verge of feeling suicidal—bitten by insects until the blood ran down from us—lost (for we bad no notion where the end of the ford might be)—at the mercy of any prowling beasts that might discover us (for our rifle locks ...
— The Ivory Trail • Talbot Mundy
... conceivable that the opposite should sometimes be the case. Some of the primitive presuppositions of human reason might have been correct and inevitable, whilst the tendency to deny them might have sprung from a plausible misunderstanding, or the exaggeration of a half-truth: so that the critical opinion itself, after destroying the spontaneous assumptions on which it rested, might be ...
— Some Turns of Thought in Modern Philosophy - Five Essays • George Santayana
... the feet of obedience." Insufficient induction (the cause of endless mistakes, and therefore of endless follies and crimes) kept Reginald unaware of the now notorious fact that the female eider, during the breeding season, is just as tame, allowing for a little exaggeration, as St. Cuthbert's own ducks are, while the male eider is just as wild and wary as any other sea-bird: a mistake altogether excusable in one who had probably never seen or heard of eider-ducks in any other spot. It may be, nevertheless, that ...
— The Hermits • Charles Kingsley
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