Truth And Exaggeration Quotes & Sayings

I speak without exaggeration when I say that I have constructed 3,000 different theories in connection with the electric light, each one of them reasonable and apparently likely to be true. Yet only in two cases did my experiments prove the truth of my theory. My chief difficulty was in constructing the carbon filament ... Every quarter of the globe was ransacked by my agents, and all sorts of the queerest materials used, until finally the shred of bamboo, now utilized by us, was settled upon. — Thomas A. Edison

If one were to reply that those who compose these books write them as fictions, and therefore are not obliged to consider the fine points of truth, I should respond that the more truthful the fiction, the better it is, and the more probable and possible, the more pleasing. Fictional tales must engage the minds of those who read them, and by restraining exaggeration and moderating impossibility, they enthrall the spirit and thereby astonish, captivate, delight, and entertain, allowing wonder and joy to move together at the same pace; none of these things can be accomplished by fleeing verisimilitude and mimesis, which together constitute perfection in writing. — Miguel De Cervantes Saavedra

Exaggeration is the kissing cousin of both truth and lie. — Khang Kijarro Nguyen

Exaggeration is overweight truth. — Matshona Dhliwayo

As in all infant sciences, the universal habit of the human mind - to take a partial or local truth, generalise it unduly and try to explain a whole field of nature in its narrow terms - runs riot here (in psychoanalysis). Moreover, the exaggeration of the importance of suppressed sexual complexes is a dangerous falsehood. — Sri Aurobindo

The peculiar property of truth is never to commit excesses. What need has it of exaggeration? There — Victor Hugo

When one is alone, imperfection must be endured every minute of the day; a couple, however, does not have to put up with it. Aren't our eyes made to be torn out, and our hearts for the same purpose? At the same time it's really not that bad; that's an exaggeration and a lie, everything is exaggeration, the only truth is longing. But even the truth of longing is not so much its own truth; it's really an expression for everything else, which is a lie. This sounds crazy and distorted, but it's true. Moreover, perhaps it isn't love when I say you are what I love the most - you are the knife I turn inside myself, this is love. This, my dear, is love. — Franz Kafka

He who cannot exaggerate is not qualified to utter truth. — Henry David Thoreau

Every exaggeration of the truth once detected by others destroys our credibility and makes all that we do and say suspect. — Stephen Covey

Please don't be too prejudiced against the poor thing because she's a liar. I do really believe that, like so many liars, there is a real substratum of truth behind her lies. I mean that though, to take an instance, her atrocity stories have grown and grown until every kind of unpleasant story that has ever appeared in print has happened to her or her relations personally, she did have a bad shock initially and did see one, at least, of her relations killed. I think a lot of these displaced persons feel, perhaps justly, that their claim to our notice and sympathy lies in their atrocity value and so they exaggerate and invent. — Agatha Christie

Entire countries are reduced to their metonyms. Kenya is a safari, Norway is fjords. And Switzerland is mountains. This is an exaggeration, but the truth in it is worth thinking about: it is a country built largely in the lee of the Alps, the towns and cities formed from old human migrations that came to rest in valleys, on lakeshores, and, sometimes, in higher regions. I had a notion: if I could understand the mountains, I could understand the country." (from "Known and Strange Things" by Teju Cole) — Teju Cole

I haven't deeply considered the matter [...] but if to look truth in the face and not resent it when it's unpalatable, and take human nature as you find it, smiling when it's absurd and grieved without exaggeration when it's pitiful, is to be cynical, then I suppose I'm a cynic. Mostly human nature is both absurd and pitiful, but if life has taught you tolerance you find in it more to smile at than to weep.
[The back of beyond] — W. Somerset Maugham

Is that true?
There is truth in it.
And lies as well?
There is an untruth, and an exaggeration. — George R R Martin

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

Within every elaborate lie, a kernel of truth. — Marisha Pessl

Danger lies in the writer becoming the victim of his own exaggeration ... 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. — Joseph Conrad

So cartooning, for me, is an honorable thing. It's pushing the envelope. It's the truth of something through exaggeration. — Bill Sienkiewicz

Your practice of psycho-analysis was a mistake. It has, for the time at least, made the work of purification more complicated, not easier. The psycho-analysis of Freud is the last thing that one should associate with yoga. It takes up a certain part, the darkest, the most perilous, the unhealthiest part of the nature, the lower vital subconscious layer, isolates some of its most morbid phenomena and attributes to it and them an action out of all proportion to its true role in the nature. Modern psychology is an infant science, at once rash, fumbling and crude. As in all infant sciences, the universal habit of the human mind - to take a partial or local truth, generalise it unduly and try to explain a whole field of Nature in its narrow terms - runs riot here. Moreover, the exaggeration of the importance of suppressed sexual complexes is a dangerous falsehood and it can have a nasty influence and tend to make the mind and vital more and not less fundamentally impure than before. — Sri Aurobindo

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

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

'Entourage' is a staple L.A.-based show, and people say it's pretty real, and I thought it was. It's an exaggeration of the truth. — Pauly Shore

Humor is the truth; wit is an exaggeration of the truth. — Stan Laurel

That's how it is with legends. The greater they sound, the more must've got left out. — Tim Tharp

An exaggeration is a truth that has lost it's temper. — Kahlil Gibran

The hype cheapens the hyped, as right things are then made wrong by exaggeration. — Criss Jami

Exaggeration! was ever any virtue attributed to a man without exaggeration? was ever any vice, without infinite exaggeration? Do we not exaggerate ourselves to ourselves, or do we recognize ourselves for the actual men we are? Are we not all great men? Yet what are we actually, to speak of? We live by exaggeration. — Henry David Thoreau

Exaggeration is the melodramatic child of truth. — Khang Kijarro Nguyen

On the whole, however, the conclusions I have drawn from the proofs quoted may, I believe, safely be relied on. Assuredly they will not be disturbed either by the lays of a poet displaying the exaggeration of his craft, or by the compositions of the chroniclers that are attractive at truth's expense; the subjects they treat of being out of the reach of evidence, and time having robbed most of them of historical value by enthroning them in the region of legend. — Thucydides

It is not in the nature of lenses to tell the whole truth. They are instruments of exaggeration and belittlement. — Walter J. Phillips

Exaggeration is truth that has lost its temper. — Kahlil Gibran

You may rely on it that you have the best of me in my books, and that I am not worth seeing personally, the stuttering, blunderingclod-hopper that I am. Even poetry, you know, is in one sense an infinite brag and exaggeration. Not that I do not stand on all that I have written,
but what am I to the truth I feebly utter? — Henry David Thoreau

If we assiduously cultivate our powers of exaggeration, perhaps we, too, shall obtain the Paradise of Liars. And there Raphael shall paint for us scores and scores of his manifestly impossible pictures ... and Shakespeare will lie to us of fabulous islands far past 'the still-vex'd Bermoothes,' and bring us fresh tales from the coast of Bohemia. For no one will speak the truth there, and we shall all be perfectly happy. — James Branch Cabell

There are some people so addicted to exaggeration that they can't tell the truth without lying. — Josh Billings

Sometimes when persons say definitely it sounds actually less true. — Emma Donoghue