'Tis a rule of manners to avoid exaggeration.
An element of exaggeration clings to the popular judgment: great vices are made greater, great virtues greater also; interesting incidents are made more interesting, softer legends more soft.
An exaggeration is a truth that has lost its temper.
Camp is a vision of the world in terms of style — but a particular kind of style. It is love of the exaggerated.
Danger lies in the writer becoming the victim of his own exaggeration, losing the exact notion of sincerity, and in the end coming to despise truth itself as something too cold, too blunt for his purpose — as, in fact, not good enough for his insistent emotion. From laughter and tears the descent is easy to sniveling and giggles.
Eschew the monumental. Shun the Epic. All the guys who can paint great big pictures can paint great small ones.
Exaggeration is a blood relation to falsehood and nearly as blamable.
Exaggeration is the inseparable companion of greatness.
He's the type who makes mountains out of molehills and then sells climbing equipment.
I don't want to tell you how much insurance I carry with the Prudential, but all I can say is: when I go, they go too.
I never exaggerate. I just remember big.
Imagine being in a room with two TV sets. One is a large screen TV with surround sound. The other is a miniature 1 screen TV. What would you tend to focus on and become absorbed in? Some people make their problems the size of the large screen TV and their personal goals the size of the miniature one. It is important to mentally minimize the problems and the cant's and maximize the goals and the cans.
It is only a short step from exaggerating what we can find in the world to exaggerating our power to remake the world. Expecting more novelty than there is, more greatness than there is, and more strangeness than there is, we imagine ourselves masters of a plastic universe. But a world we can shape to our will is a shapeless world.
It is the essence of truth that it is never excessive. Why should it exaggerate? There is that which should be destroyed and that which should be simply illuminated and studied. How great is the force of benevolent and searching examination! We must not resort to the flame where only light is required.
Love is a gross exaggeration of the difference between one person and everybody else.
Pretense is the overrating of any kind of knowledge we pretend to.
There are some people so addicted to exaggeration that they can't tell the truth without lying.
There is no one who does not exaggerate!
Thought is a process of exaggeration. The refusal to exaggerate is not infrequently an alibi for the disinclination to think or praise.
We always weaken everything we exaggerate.