Quotes & Sayings About Overstatement

The term ignorant is indeed perhaps an overstatement, implying as it does that something is known somewhere, whereas in reality we are not even sure of this: we in fact cannot aver with any degree of certainty that we are ignorant. Yet this is not so bad; we have at any rate kept our open-mindedness
that, at least, we may be sure that we have
and are not in any danger, or so it seems, of freezing into the pious attitudes of those true spiritual bigots whose faces are turned toward eternity and who therefore can see nothing. — John Ashbery

Reserve is strength; overstatement is weakness. No one cares to hear the singer's topmost notes when the voice is 'nigh onto breaking. — John F. Carlson

The term itself - my life - is a desperate overstatement. — Don DeLillo

Photography is a kind of overstatement, a heroic copulation with the material world. — Susan Sontag

Baley distrusted overstatement and had no liking for the armchair deducer who discovered certainty rather than probability in the workings of logic. — Isaac Asimov

It is a gross overstatement, but in chess, it can be said I play against my opponent over the board and against myself on the clock. — Viktor Korchnoi

'The Fall' changed my life - that's not an overstatement. — Jamie Dornan

The chief error in philosophy is overstatement. — Alfred North Whitehead

A single overstatement, wherever or however it occurs, diminishes the whole, and a carefree superlative has the power to destroy, for the reader, the object of the writer's enthusiasm. — E.B. White

Between overstatement and understatement lies one hundred percent. — Sten Nadolny

If you treat every situation as a life and death matter, you'll die a lot of times. — Dean Smith

You know, Hitler wanted to be an artist. At eighteen he took his inheritance, seven hundred kronen, and moved to Vienna to live and study ... Ever see one of his paintings? Neither have I. Resistance beat him. Call it overstatement but I'll say it anyway: it was easier for Hitler to start World War II than it was for him to face a blank square of canvas. — Steven Pressfield

Verbal description of everything, however, must remain infinitely distant from the thing itself, overstatement and understatement sometimes hitting off the truth better than a flat assertion of bare fact. — Anthony Powell

There's been this attempt to block Donald Trump, in primary candidates and Democrats, that - to try to make everything he says some sort of extreme overstatement. — Jeff Sessions

Arabella had a habit of overstating things, one that she had so much internalised that it was not always easy for she herself to tell when she was mildly pleased about something and when she was genuinely delighted. Gresham's Law was at work: the cheap money of overstatement was gradually driving out the good money of true feeling. But she was in this case genuinely pleased. She wanted the changes made to her room and she wanted them soon and was pleased that Bogdan would be able to do them, because, beneath the hyperbole, she liked and trusted him. — John Lanchester

A friend of mine is a chef in Bali, and another friend said, 'God, he's like Brad Pitt,' and I said, 'Yeah, I think he's more like arm Pitt,' 'cause, you know, 'Brad Pitt' would be a bit of an overstatement. — Owain Yeoman

Never exaggerate. It is a matter of great importance to forego superlatives, in part to avoid offending the truth, and in part to avoid cheapening your judgment. Exaggeration wastes distinction and testifies to the paucity of your understanding and taste. Praise excites anticipation and stimulates desire. Afterwards when value does not measure up to price, disappointment turns against the fraud and takes revenge by cheapening both the appraised and the appraise. For this reason let the prudent go slowly, and err in understatement rather than overstatement. The extraordinary of every kind is always rare, wherefore temper your estimate. — Baltasar Gracian

Leaving out the gamblers, the burglars, and the plumbers, perhaps we do put our trust in God after a fashion. But, after all, it is an overstatement.
If the cholera or black plague should come to these shores, perhaps the bulk of the nation would pray to be delivered from it, but the rest would put their trust in The Health Board ... — Mark Twain

What's on your mind, if you will allow the overstatement. — Fred Allen

In some sort of crude sense, which no vulgarity, no humor, no overstatement can quite extinguish, the physicists have known sin; and this is a knowledge which they cannot lose. — J. Robert Oppenheimer

Those of you who have spent time with Australians know that we are not given to overstatement. By nature we are laconic speakers and by conviction we are realistic thinkers. — Julia Gillard

A food processor, or even one of those small bowls that fit on a stick blender, is a real treasure. No, that's not an overstatement. — Yotam Ottolenghi

Most people don't realize how important librarians are. I ran across a book recently which suggested that the peace and prosperity of a culture was solely related to how many librarians it contained. Possibly a slight overstatement. But a culture that doesn't value its librarians doesn't value ideas and without ideas, well, where are we? — Neil Gaiman

Thus, after all, the actual rates of aggregate saving and spending do not depend on Precaution, Foresight, Calculation, Improvement, Independence, Enterprise, Pride or Avarice. Virtue and vice play no part. It all depends on how far the rate of interest is favourable to investment, after taking account of the marginal efficiency of capital. No, this is an overstatement. If the rate of interest were so governed as to maintain continuous full employment, virtue would resume her sway;
the rate of capital accumulation would depend on the weakness of the propensity to consume. Thus, once again, the tribute that classical economists pay to her is due to their concealed assumption that the rate of interest always is so governed. — John Maynard Keynes

Love songs are nothing without exaggeration. — Mokokoma Mokhonoana

and in that she's not merely pretty. It wouldn't be an overstatement to call her, as Dr. D once did, "a boldly sapient creature of divine enchantment." Form, I think, is dialectically related to content. And in fact it's perhaps her not-mere-prettiness, her intellect and sense of style and kindness and competency and good joke timing and infectious joy for life, etc., that have, to my mind (and, believe me, many others'), elevated her from the more crowded and clamorous ranks of the pretty to the rarified stratum of the beautiful. Something about her suggests the endless unfolding of possibilities. Ana — Alena Graedon