"Hyperbole" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... he did not regard them as fraud, but admitted on the contrary that the agents or narrators honestly believed them. The supernatural was not imparted to deceive, but was the result of oriental modes of speech, such as hyperbole, parable, or ellipsis, in which the steps by which the process was performed were omitted. The smoke of Sinai was considered a thunderstorm; the shining of Moses's ...
— History of Free Thought in Reference to The Christian Religion • Adam Storey Farrar
... from "Coriolanus" and "King John" what magnificence of hyperbole! The imagination of the reader, swept on from image to image, is strained to follow that of the poet. And yet, to the capable, how the pile of amplification lifts out the naked truth. Read these passages to a score of well-clad auditors, taken by chance from ...
— Essays AEsthetical • George Calvert
... well as the most important and those oftenest used are, Simile, Metaphor, Personification, Allegory, Synechdoche, Metonymy, Exclamation, Hyperbole, Apostrophe, Vision, Antithesis, Climax, Epigram, ...
— How to Speak and Write Correctly • Joseph Devlin
... door. The last phrase was the puzzler. It read at first like a boast—like one of those picturesque expressions with which the Eastern mind enjoys to overstate its case. But he reflected on it. As an Orientalist of admitted distinction he had long ago concluded that hyperbole in the East is always based on some fact hidden in the user's mind, often without the user's knowledge. He had written a paper on that very subject, which the Spectator printed with favorable editorial comment; and Mendelsohn K. C. had written him a very agreeable letter stating that his own experience ...
— Guns of the Gods • Talbot Mundy
... or reflective mind Karl's startling metaphors were harmless hyperbole or garrulous trope of brilliant, idealistic sentiment, but such fired credulous natures to white heat of anarchy. It became essential to German tranquillity that Karl ...
— Oswald Langdon - or, Pierre and Paul Lanier. A Romance of 1894-1898 • Carson Jay Lee
... tongues, poets honouring with despairing emulation, the whole mind of educated man feeling the transcendent power of the poet of the Iliad and Odyssey. Surely, the boasted triumph of poetry over space and time is no daring hyperbole—surely, it is little more than the boasted ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 17, No. 476, Saturday, February 12, 1831 • Various
... home a beaten man. I had not felt the heat before, save as a beautiful exaggeration of sunshine; but now it oppressed me with the prosaic vulgarity of an oven. What had been poetic intensity became all at once rhetorical hyperbole. I might suspect his thermometer (as indeed I did, for we Harvard men are apt to think ill of any graduation but our own); but it was a poor consolation. The fact remained that his herald Mercury, standing a tiptoe, could look ...
— My Garden Acquaintance • James Russell Lowell
... divert public attention, to employ the idle, to popularise your Highness's rule, and, if it were possible, to enable him to reduce the taxes at a blow and to a notable amount. The proposed expedition - for it cannot without hyperbole be called a war - seemed to the council to combine the various characters required; a marked improvement in the public sentiment has followed even upon our preparations; and I cannot doubt that when success shall follow, the effect will ...
— Prince Otto • Robert Louis Stevenson
... like two Easterns! For not to be outdone in courtesy, Rex warned him not to put too large charges of powder for fear the barrel should burst—being so old. A caution which I believe to be totally unnecessary, and a mere hyperbole of depreciation—as Peter seemed perfectly to understand! He told me it was "The first present I ever receive from a gentleman. Well—well—I never forget it, the longest day I live." The graceful candour with which he said, "I am very thankful ...
— Juliana Horatia Ewing And Her Books • Horatia K. F. Eden
... over much that may be said of like purport upon Hyperbole, Personification, Apostrophe, &c., let us close our remarks upon construction by a typical example. The general principle which has been enunciated is, that other things equal, the force of all verbal forms and arrangements is great, in proportion as the time and mental effort ...
— The Philosophy of Style • Herbert Spencer
... shall give visible form and life to the abstract ideas of our written constitutions; which shall confer upon virtue all the strength of principle and all the energy of passion; which shall disentangle freedom from cant and senseless hyperbole, and render it a thing of such loveliness and grandeur as to justify all self-sacrifice; which shall make us love man by the new consecrations it sheds on his life and destiny; which shall force through the thin partitions of conventialism and expediency; vindicate the majesty ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, February 1844 - Volume 23, Number 2 • Various
... Laws, which was sent to Johnson in the same year (1775), at the recommendation of Lord North, at that time Chancellor of the University, and Prime Minister, was in some measure intended to be the reward of his obsequiousness. In this instrument, he is called, with an hyperbole of praise which the University would perhaps now he more cautious of applying to any individual, "In Literarum ...
— Lives of the English Poets - From Johnson to Kirke White, Designed as a Continuation of - Johnson's Lives • Henry Francis Cary
... any of my readers has a copy on his highest shelves, I would venture to ask him to take down the third volume, and read the concluding pages, of which Coleridge used to say that they were the finest specimen of historic eulogy he had ever read in English, adding with forgivable hyperbole, that they were more to the Duke's fame and glory than a campaign. 'Foresight and enterprise with our commander went hand in hand; he never advanced but so as to be sure of his retreat; and never retreated but in such an attitude as to impose upon a superior enemy,' and so on through the sum of Wellington's ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Volume I (of 3) - Essay 4: Macaulay • John Morley
... was his mission to probe our moral ulcers to the roots and to raise moribund ideals from the dust, breathing his own vitality into them, till they rose before our eyes as living aspirations. The spiritual joy of which he wrote was no rhetorical hyperbole; it was manifest in the man himself, and was the fount of the lofty idealism which made him not only "the Conscience of Russia" but ...
— The Forged Coupon and Other Stories • Leo Tolstoy
... all his disparagement of these abortive spats, knew full well that any one of them held the makings of a deadly duel and that Jose's lurid threats were no mere Latin hyperbole. He realized that the red-crowned bowman ruled his crew exactly as any of the old-time buccaneers whom he resembled had governed their free-booting gangs—by the iron hand; and that, though these men sailed no Spanish Main and flew no black flag, the iron-hand government was needed. He saw also that ...
— The Pathless Trail • Arthur O. (Arthur Olney) Friel
... collector of Pegnugger, whose stories of his outlying district were full of humour and anecdote. The talk bending in the direction of adventure, Kildare, who had been lately in South Africa with his regiment, told some tales of Zulus and assegais and Boers in the Hibernian style of hyperbole. The Irish blood never comes out so strongly as when a story is to be told, and no amount of English education and Oxford accent will suppress the tendency. The brogue is gone, but the love of the marvellous is there still. ...
— Mr. Isaacs • F. Marion Crawford
... do not over-exploit their distinguished guests with embarrassing hyperbole, or make personal remarks. Both are in worst possible taste. Do not understand by this that explanations can not be made; it is only that they must not be embarrassingly made to their faces. Nor must a "specialist's" subject be forced upon him, like a pair of manacles, by any exploiting ...
— Etiquette • Emily Post
... a something that begins in sensation and ends in sentiment. Thanks to beautiful and permissible hyperbole, you have begun with sensation in your description of love, and have ended with sentiment. You have told me about love, in terms of love, which is a vain performance and unscientific. Now let me make you a definition. Love is a disorder of mind and body, and is produced ...
— The Kempton-Wace Letters • Jack London
... a difficulty in describing without seeming hyperbole the impressions I daily received, and beheld confirmed by facts, of the extraordinary spirit of movement that appears to impel men and things in this country; this great hive wherein there be no drones; this field in which every man finds place for his plough, and where each hand seems ...
— Impressions of America - During The Years 1833, 1834, and 1835. In Two Volumes, Volume II. • Tyrone Power
... founded upon a literal reading of the scriptural command that a man's left hand should not know what has right hand gives in alms, and this scruple had been ingeniously set at rest by the parson, who, failing in an attempt to explain the force of Eastern hyperbole to the little ladies' satisfaction, had said that Miss Betty, being the elder, and the head of the house, might be likened to the right hand, and Miss Kitty, as the younger, to the left, and that if they pursued their good ...
— Tales from Many Sources - Vol. V • Various
... July and August, the scarlet lobelia, the cardinal-flower, is to be found. Never was cardinal so robed. If Herbert's rose, in poetic hyperbole, with its "hue angry and brave, bids the rash gazer wipe his eye," certainly such a bed of lobelia as I once saw on the road to "Rollo's Camp" was anything but what the Scotch would call "a sight for sair een." For the space of a dozen ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 27, January, 1860 • Various
... designs you impute to me, when I should be the first victim of the outbreak? And you little know my people, if you think that such a movement would be made without my orders; when the very birds in my dominions," said he, with somewhat of an hyperbole, "would scarcely venture to fly contrary ...
— History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William Hickling Prescott
... statements, and frequently it serves to lend piquancy and force to style. But this tendency is dangerous, and should be kept under restraint. As a rule it is best to see and describe things as they are. The following from "Julius Caesar" will serve as an example of hyperbole: ...
— Elementary Guide to Literary Criticism • F. V. N. Painter
... settlement. In 1852, the Democrats, assembled in national conventions at Baltimore, indorsed them in their platform. So did the Whigs; and Rufus Choate, their convention orator, was excusable for his hyperbole when he described "with what instantaneous and mighty charm they calmed the madness ...
— Stephen Arnold Douglas • William Garrott Brown
... things being its "chief" delights-and then the pre-eminent beauty and naturalness of the concluding lines, whose very hyperbole only renders them more true to nature when we consider the innocence, the artlessness, the enthusiasm, the passionate girl, and more passionate ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 5 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... the sublime, they endeavoured to supply by hyperbole; their amplification had no limits; they left not only reason but fancy behind them; and produced combinations of confused magnificence, that not only could not be credited, but could ...
— Lives of the Poets, Vol. 1 • Samuel Johnson
... attractive only to the lowest rank of workers, the lazy, and the inefficient. Therefore Socialist Communists endeavour to make Communism appear more palatable to the active and the efficient by the lavish use of poetry and hyperbole. For instance, we learn: "He who makes the canvas is as useful as he that paints the picture. He who cleanses the sewer and prevents disease is as useful as the physician who cures the malady after it has ...
— British Socialism - An Examination of Its Doctrines, Policy, Aims and Practical Proposals • J. Ellis Barker
... to my reading, I believe I may aver, without hyperbole, it has been tolerably extensive in the historical department; so that few nations exist, or have existed, with whose records I am not in some degree acquainted, from Herodotus down to Gibbon. Of the ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Letters and Journals, Vol. 1 • Lord Byron, Edited by Rowland E. Prothero
... the skipper, who was addicted somewhat to figurative language and hyperbole in the form of slang, "another week in the doctor's hands, an' the grub of the London Home, will set 'em up taught an' ...
— Shifting Winds - A Tough Yarn • R.M. Ballantyne
... say of a woman, that she only does not destroy where she passes. She should revive; the harebells should bloom, not stoop, as she passes. You think I am rushing into wild hyperbole! Pardon me, not a whit—I mean what I say in calm English, spoken in resolute truth. You have heard it said—(and I believe there is more than fancy even in that saying, but let it pass for a fanciful ...
— Sesame and Lilies • John Ruskin
... House. Usually mere hyperbole, a lamentable fault of our national literature. Even our presidents, before Roosevelt, called ...
— Write It Right - A Little Blacklist of Literary Faults • Ambrose Bierce
... her debts," said Toombs on one occasion. "If she does not, I will pay them for her!" This piece of hyperbole was softened by the fact that on two occasions, when the State needed money to supply deficits, Toombs with other Georgians did come forward and lift the pressure. Sometimes he talked in a random way, but responsibility always sobered him. He was ...
— Robert Toombs - Statesman, Speaker, Soldier, Sage • Pleasant A. Stovall
... proportions, more statuesque, and more deliberately and advisedly to be characterized by no adequate word but the word magnificent, (a word too often and lightly abused.) In reality, speaking of women, I have seen many beautiful figures, but hardly one except Agnes that could, without hyperbole, be styled truly and memorably magnificent. Though in the first order of tall women, yet, being full in person, and with a symmetry that was absolutely faultless, she seemed to the random sight as little above the ordinary height. Possibly from ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... silentigi. Husk sxelo. Hussar husaro. Hustle pusxegi. Hut budo. Hutch kesto. Hyacinth hiacinto. Hydra hidro. Hydrogen hidrogeno. Hydropathy akvokuraco. Hydrophobia hidrofobio. Hydrostatic hidrostatika. Hyena hieno. Hygrometer higrometro. Hygrometry higrometrio. Hymn himno. Hyperbole hiperbolo. Hyphen streketo. Hypnotic hipnota. Hypnotism hipnotismo. Hypnotize hipnotigi. Hypochondria hipohxondrio. Hypocrisy hipokriteco. Hypocrite hipokritulo. Hypocritical hipokrita. Hypothesis hipotezo. Hypotenuse hipotenuzo. ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... the United States, and England would feel the shock from Land's End to John o'Groat's. The lives of nearly two millions of our countrymen are dependent upon the cotton crops of America; their destiny may be said, without any sort of hyperbole, ...
— Sunny Memories Of Foreign Lands, Volume 1 (of 2) • Harriet Elizabeth (Beecher) Stowe
... the barbarities of Russian autocracy, and the horrors of America's methods in the Philippines, copied after Weyler's reconcentrado policy in Cuba. His study of Christian Science, despite its hyperbole, its gross exaggerations and unfulfilled prophecies, is the expression of glorified common-sense, a sociological study of religious fanaticism comprehensive in psychological analysis ...
— Mark Twain • Archibald Henderson
... children. If the man said there was a horse under him, it was a figure of speech, which we call hyperbole; he only meant to state in a funny way that the ...
— Dotty Dimple Out West • Sophie May
... to note the excess of this passion; and how it braves the nature and value of things, by this—that the speaking in a perpetual hyperbole is comely in ...
— Manon Lescaut • Abbe Prevost
... Charlton," she cried, "what refuge have I now from ridicule, or perhaps disgrace! Mr Delvile has been detected watching me in disguise! he has been discovered at this late hour meeting me in private! The story will reach his family with all the hyperbole of exaggeration;—how will his noble mother disdain me! how cruelly shall I sink before the severity ...
— Cecilia vol. 2 - Memoirs of an Heiress • Frances (Fanny) Burney (Madame d'Arblay)
... and peach-blossom complexion, her soft contralto voice, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, as per foregoing bald description, and as per what can, by imaginative effort, be pictured from the Pujolic hyperbole, by which I, the unimportant narrator of these chronicles, was dazzled ...
— The Joyous Adventures of Aristide Pujol • William J. Locke
... Words flowed from him like oil from a gusher. Hyperbole, compliment, praise, appreciation, honeyed gallantry, golden opinions, eulogy, and unveiled panegyric vied with one another for pre-eminence in his speech. We had small hopes that Ileen could resist his oratory and ...
— Options • O. Henry
... address:—"GENTLEMEN, You are met here on the greatest occasion that, I believe, England ever saw; having upon your shoulders the interests of three great nations, with the territories belonging to them: and truly I believe I may say it without any hyperbole, you have upon your shoulders the interest of all the Christian people in the world. And the expectation is, that I should let you know, as far as I have cognisance of it, the occasion of your ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 378, April, 1847 • Various
... half naked and half starving through the whole inclement winter, and perished of pestilence in droves, after confronting the less formidable dangers of battlefield and leaguer. Manfully and sympathetically did the Earl of Leicester—while whining in absurd hyperbole over the angry demeanour of his sovereign towards himself-represent the imperative duty of an English government ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... of native life, lacking all the scope and interest common to a strenuous age, appears galvanised into some fleeting semblance of vitality by the extravaganza presented to it, for the language of hyperbole is the natural expression of Eastern thought, and penetrates into mental recesses unknown and unexplored by the relater of unvarnished facts. The quick response of the native mind to Nature's teaching, and the wealth of tradition woven round flower and ...
— Through the Malay Archipelago • Emily Richings
... there may be an indefinite degree of hyperbole. The language of love and hate, of confidence and despair, is not the language of description. In this train of the religious consciousness there is occasion for whatever eloquence man can feel, and whatever rhetorical luxuriance ...
— The Approach to Philosophy • Ralph Barton Perry
... incredulous ear. I had attributed his praises to the partiality of a lover's eye— having not the slightest suspicion that their object was possessed of such merits. No more should I question the justice of his admiration, nor wonder at its warmth. The rude hyperbole that had occasionally escaped him, when speaking of the "girl"—as he called her—no longer appeared extravagant. In truth, the charms of this magnificent maiden were worthy of metaphoric phrase. Perhaps, had I seen her first—before looking upon Lilian—that is, had ...
— The Wild Huntress - Love in the Wilderness • Mayne Reid
... 3. Death ... blushed to annihilation. This very daring hyperbole will hardly bear—nor does it want—manipulation into prose. Briefly, the nature of Death is to be pallid: therefore Death, in blushing, abnegates his very nature, and almost ceases to ...
— Adonais • Shelley
... drawing its sustenance partly from the hard soil of our New England, partly, too, from the air that has known Himalaya and the Ganges. So imprest with this character of his mind was Mr. Burlingame,[11] as I saw him, after his return from his mission, that he said to me, in a freshet of hyperbole, which was the overflow of a channel with a thread of truth running in it, "There are twenty thousand ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. X (of X) - America - II, Index • Various
... fantastic "Ballade a la Lune," exaggerates the romantic so decidedly as to seem ironical. It is hard to say whether it is hyperbole or parody. See Petit de Julleville, vol. ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... loftier principle. The charm of his imagination and the music of his words took away all the sting from the thoughts that penetrated to the very marrow of the entranced listeners. Sometimes it was a splendid hyperbole that illuminated a statement which by the dim light of common speech would have offended or repelled those who sat before him. He knew the force of felix audacia as well as any rhetorician could have taught him. He addresses the reformer with one of those daring ...
— Ralph Waldo Emerson • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... all her dreams of the ideal man. His smile, his voice, his hand, his hair—never were such! Why, when he spoke—it was positively music! When he smiled—it was heaven! His smile, to Sophia, was one of those natural phenomena which are so lovely that they make you want to shed tears. There is no hyperbole in this description of Sophia's sensations, but rather an under-statement of them. She was utterly obsessed by the unique qualities of Mr. Scales. Nothing would have persuaded her that the peer of Mr. Scales existed among men, or could possibly ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... correct. By another form of expression, similar in character to the "seven times in a day," he intimates that faith possesses an unlimited power of production in the department of doing. To intensify the result he employs a double hyperbole, as engineers employ two pairs of wheels to generate extreme rapidity of motion; the smallest spark of faith will overcome the greatest obstacles that may lie across a Christian's path. Again, the same idea which appeared before in Matt. xvii. 20, is expressed here by a different figure: in ...
— The Parables of Our Lord • William Arnot
... all the great English poets know no equal in the five centuries that rolled between them. The first person to say this publicly was himself a poet and a devoted student of Form—Walter Savage Landor. When he said it, people thought it was mere hyperbole, the stressed language of compliment; but we know now that Landor's words are as true as ...
— Robert Browning: How To Know Him • William Lyon Phelps
... great defects of the Pharsalia. We see the sacrifice of the whole to the parts, neglect of the matter in an over-studious regard for the manner, aself-conscious tone appealing rather to an audience than to a reader, venting itself in apostrophes, digressions, hyperbole (over-drawn description), episodes and epigrams, an unhappy laboriousness that strains itself to be first-rate for a moment, but leaves the poem ...
— Helps to Latin Translation at Sight • Edmund Luce
... that 'a strong city,' 'a strong arm,' give us the primitive sense of neter? When among ourselves one says 'divine music,' 'a piece of divine poetry,' 'the divine taste of a peach,' 'the divine beauty of a woman,' [the word] divine is a hyperbole, but it would be a mistake to declare that it originally meant 'exquisite' because in the phrases which I have imagined one could apply it as 'exquisite music,' 'a piece of exquisite poetry,' 'the exquisite taste of a peach,' 'the exquisite beauty ...
— Egyptian Ideas of the Future Life • E. A. Wallis Budge
... my child? All might seem hyperbole, even to my dearest mother. In him I find satisfaction, for the first time, to the deep wants of my heart. Yet, thinking of those other sweet ones fled, I must look upon him as a treasure only lent. He is a fair child, with blue eyes and light hair; ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. II • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... of the songs that are frequently accompanied by immodest gestures of the body. Some of them are "not sufficiently decent to bear translating." The one marked (4) is interesting as an attempt at hyperbole. ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... Such hyperbole naturally challenged opposition, and Maimonides' opponents did not hesitate to give voice to their deep indignation, as ...
— Jewish Literature and Other Essays • Gustav Karpeles
... gets a verbal rise outen him more'n if he's a graven image. Vance is gettin' proud of himse'f, an' Jenkins, who comes prowlin' 'round the game at times, begins to reckon mebby Vance'll do. All goes well ontil a party lets fly some hyperbole about a tavern he strikes in Little Rock, which for size an' extensif characteristics lays over anythin' on earth like a ...
— Wolfville Days • Alfred Henry Lewis
... carpist imagine I have dealt in hyperbole, or hand-illumined the facts: I have merely stated some simple truths about the early career ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 12 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Scientists • Elbert Hubbard
... who had fought under William and the great grandsons of those who had fought under Harold began to draw near to each other." Macaulay was a great scene painter, who neglected delicate truths of detail for exaggerated distemper effects. He used the {283} rhetorical machinery of climax and hyperbole for all that it was worth, and he "made points"—as in his essay on Bacon—by creating antithesis. In his History of England, he inaugurated the picturesque method of historical writing. The book was as fascinating as any novel. Macaulay, like Scott, had the historic imagination, though ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... followed Ritter in taking trecenos as loosely put for 365, a steer for each day in the year. The hyperbole, as he says, would otherwise be too extravagant. And richer spilth the ...
— Odes and Carmen Saeculare of Horace • Horace
... appropriately. There is no suggestion of mawkishness in his discourse. Our Ferdinand, however, is distinctly spoony. There went no poetic irony to his creation, and he has no saving sense of humor. He never seems, like Romeo, to be toying with hyperbole in an artistic spirit, but it is all dead earnest. Such a love-lorn youth must expect to recruit his admirers chiefly from the ranks of the very young. And yet there are times, just as in the case of Karl Moor, when Ferdinand's rhetoric becomes impressive from sheer titanic ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... vast, so purified from eccentricity, and we grasp it so imperfectly, that we are apt to deny it altogether, and conceive his mind as impersonal. In view of the multiplicity of his creations, and the range of thought, emotion, and character they include, it is a common hyperbole of criticism to designate him as universal. But, in truth, his mind was restricted, in its creative action, like other minds, within the limits of its personal sympathies, though these sympathies in him were keener, quicker, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 118, August, 1867 • Various
... coming down the chronological line of descent, you will find them all made after the same pattern. The real personage is all covered up and concealed under the embroidered veils of the romancer and the enthusiastic historiographer. What is surprising to me is that this tendency to exaggeration and hyperbole is not more commonly allowed for by those who in our days attempt to discuss and compare religions. We are constantly and painfully reminded that the prejudice of inimical critics, on the one hand, and the furious bigotry of devotees, on the other, blind men to ...
— The Life of Buddha and Its Lessons • H.S. Olcott
... tell you what he is: he is a youth, A noble branch, increasing blessed fruit, Where caterpillar vice dare not to touch: He bears[351] himself with so much gravity, Praise cannot praise him with hyperbole: He is one, whom older look upon as on a book: Wherein are printed noble sentences For them to rule their lives by. Indeed he is one, All emulate his virtues, ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. IX • Various
... into which it must remerge, can but suspend the artist over Life, with his feet in the air and his head in the clouds—Prig masquerading as Demi-god. "Nature is no great Mother who has borne us. She is our creation. It is in our brain that she quickens to life." Such is the highest hyperbole of the aesthetic creed. But what is creative instinct, if not an incessant living sympathy with Nature, a constant craving like that of Nature's own, to fashion something new out of all that comes within the grasp of those faculties with which Nature ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... what the adverse forces were, their sustained resistance, their frequent recovery, the critical moments when the struggle seemed for ever desperate, in 1685, in 1772, in 1808, it is no hyperbole to say that the progress of the world towards self-government would have been arrested but for the strength afforded by the religious motive in the seventeenth century. And this constancy of progress, ...
— A Lecture on the Study of History • Lord Acton
... omnibus conductor in the Strand, and you may marry a duke's daughter; you may have been an oyster-girl in New York, and you may entertain royalties. It is impossible to exaggerate an age of anomaly and hyperbole. There never was an age when people were so voracious of amusement, and so tired of it, both in one. It is a perpetual carnival and a permanent yawn. If you can do anything to amuse us you are safe—till we get used to you—and then you amuse no longer, and must ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... written by Lady Morgan. In the body of the volume, there is not one new nor curious article, unless it be Lady Hood's "Tiger Hunt." In your Mechanics there is a miserable want of information, and in your Statistics there is a sad superabundance of American hyperbole and dulness mixed together, like the mud and gunpowder which, when a boy, I used to mix together to make a fizz. Your Poetry is so bad that I look upon it as your personal kindness to me that you did not put my lines under that head. Your criticism on Painting begins by calling West's ...
— A Publisher and His Friends • Samuel Smiles
... were, the more it has tended to take the place of Hebraism. But the Platonists, too, when left to their instincts, follow their master in attributing power and existence, by a sort of cumulative worship and imaginative hyperbole, to what in the first place they worship because it is good. To divorce, then, as the modernists do, the history of the world from the story of salvation, and God's government and the sanctions of religion from the operation of matter, is a fundamental ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana
... praises an actor in this way, one is always open to accusations of prejudice, hyperbole, uncritical gush, unreasoned eulogy, and the rest. Must a careful and deliberate opinion always deny a great man genius? If so, no careful and ...
— The Story of My Life - Recollections and Reflections • Ellen Terry
... Elmer nonchalantly. He was a thin, anaemic-looking young fellow a couple of years younger than Virginia who affected a swagger and gloves and who had a cough which was insistent, but which he strove to disguise. And yet Florrie's hyperbole had not been entirely without warrant. He had something of Virginia's fine profile, a look of her in his eyes, the stamp of good blood upon him. He suffered his sister to kiss him, meantime turning his ...
— The Bells of San Juan • Jackson Gregory
... seem full of hyperbole to those who know, in history, the king, and, by sight, the palace employed in the priest's similes; but if we think of Louis XIV not in his person but as a representative of the civilization of Europe that was asserting its first claim there ...
— The French in the Heart of America • John Finley
... was not used to this type of man, nor had she met any one who used hyperbole in conversation. At first she fancied that he might be chaffing her, but she was too intelligent to harbor that idea, so convincing was his innate sincerity; but nevertheless, she meant ...
— The Black Pearl • Mrs. Wilson Woodrow
... on you could call it real spelling. They spelled from the grammars, hyperbole, synecdoche, and epizeuxis. They spelled from the physiology, chlorophyll, coccyx, arytenoid, and the names of the bones and nerves, and all the ...
— Laddie • Gene Stratton Porter
... be made by certain well-known people. The last name on the list of speakers was that of Mrs. Stanfield Fredericks. Milly was much excited. She was eager to go to the meeting, if for no better reason than from a natural curiosity to see the famous house, so often the theme of newspaper hyperbole. Also she was anxious to hear Hazel talk. But she doubted the propriety of her going anywhere so early in her widowhood. While she was debating this point with herself the telephone rang and Hazel Fredericks asked if she had received ...
— One Woman's Life • Robert Herrick
... if the great navigators, before venturing to face the unknown, had waited to be provided with vessels fit to make long voyages, the progress of research would have been much slower than was the case. It sounds like hyperbole to say that, when pitch and planks failed, these gallant seamen stopped their leaks with hope and ardour; but really, something like that is ...
— The Life of Captain Matthew Flinders • Ernest Scott
... Homer; but he is also compared to Ariosto, because of his wealth of imagery. His heroes are very different from those to whom we have been wont to pay our allegiance; but they fight for the same principles and worship as lovely maids, to judge from the hyperbole employed in their description. The condensation of the Shah-Nameh reads like a dry chronicle; but in its entirety it reminds one of nothing so much as a gorgeous Persian web, so light and varied, so brightened is it by its wealth ...
— National Epics • Kate Milner Rabb
... carry your brains next to the ground in your heels."[1] Hence it is necessary to know where to draw the line; for if ever it is overstepped the effect of the hyperbole is spoilt, being in such cases relaxed by overstraining, and producing the very opposite ...
— On the Sublime • Longinus
... them their code of laws, and the history of their tribes, is a sufficient proof that they understood a written language which there can be no doubt, they would use the utmost caution not to lose. Such an account would be more authentic than the Chinese annals, the best of which abound in hyperbole, and contain facts so disguised in metaphor, that it is no easy matter to extract from them the simple truth. At all events, the comparison of the two histories would serve ...
— Travels in China, Containing Descriptions, Observations, and Comparisons, Made and Collected in the Course of a Short Residence at the Imperial Palace of Yuen-Min-Yuen, and on a Subsequent Journey thr • John Barrow
... affections and their self-forgetting inspirations, to the end that his understanding, or the faculty designated by the word head as opposed to heart, might curiously construct a fabric to be wondered at. Hyperbole in the language of Montrose is a mean instrument made mighty because wielded by an afflicted soul, and strangeness is here the order of Nature. Montrose stretched after remote things, but was at the same time propelled towards ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... severed from us by hatred and prejudice, the prosperity which we still claim, and the renown which was once accorded to us. By so doing, and by so doing only, shall our former grandeur come back to us—though its garments be stained with blood. A grandeur which, without hyperbole, it may be said, will outstrip the glory which, as a young and sanguine people, we have ever claimed for our country. The reason for so believing is the simple and undeniable fact that out of the saddening humiliation and devastation ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No IV, April 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... this is hyperbole! One of the most remarkable accompanists in Paris, an attache of the Opera Comique, M. Bazile, was once so overcome by emotion in accompanying Delsarte that for some seconds the piano ...
— Delsarte System of Oratory • Various
... scant) To take leave of thee, GREAT PLANT! Or in any terms relate Half my love, or half my hate: For I hate, yet love, thee so, That, whichever thing I shew, The plain truth will seem to be A constrain'd hyperbole, And the passion to proceed More from a mistress than a weed. Sooty retainer to the vine, Bacchus' black servant, negro fine; Sorcerer, that mak'st us dote upon Thy begrimed complexion, And, for thy pernicious sake, More and ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb IV - Poems and Plays • Charles and Mary Lamb
... the future. In answer to this desire, eighteen chief men and their attendants, making in all about fifty, came together from the nine tribes of the nation, and met him in solemn council on the afternoon of May 18th. Speeches, not lacking in interest, but full of Indian hyperbole and the inflations of interpreters, were made by the chiefs, and answered by Oglethorpe through the medium of Messrs. Wiggin and Musgrove; and on May 21st the treaty ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, v. 13 • Various
... will find the most of what extravagance there is in English literature. In America you find extravagance in our humor, and this humor, perhaps, owes as much of its extravagance to an Irish ancestry as to an environment of new wonders that could not be well expressed save in hyperbole. ...
— Irish Plays and Playwrights • Cornelius Weygandt
... poetry, without its numbers or magnificence; a heap of monstrous stories, only more conspicuous by their incredibility. He is unpardonable, therefore, who cannot distinguish one from the other; but lays on history the paint of poetry, its flattery, fable, and hyperbole: it is just as ridiculous as it would be to clothe one of our robust wrestlers, who is as hard as an oak, in fine purple, or some such meretricious garb, and put paint {26} on his cheeks; how would such ornaments debase and degrade him! I do not mean by ...
— Trips to the Moon • Lucian
... Big Wind" would make his maiden address in the House, taking as his subject "two or three important matters in connection with the budget. A rare treat is in store for those who will be able to attend," and all the rest of the hyperbole that the party papers—except yours, dear reader—are wont to indulge in. Of course, the galleries of the House were crowded, and on the floor every member was in his seat. In the press gallery the attendance of ...
— William Adolphus Turnpike • William Banks
... possession of him. Who was it that, in a burst of hyperbole, said that if one took up his station at Broadway and Thirty-fourth Street, he would, if he stayed there long enough, see everybody in the world go past? Or was it Kipling who said that of ...
— Doubloons—and the Girl • John Maxwell Forbes
... countenance wonderingly; in his expression true distress was mingled with apprehensiveness. He had the air of an unwilling guide detailed to conduct an unsuspecting innocent to be shocked by the revelations of a chamber of horrors; she put it that way to herself in jesting hyperbole. ...
— All-Wool Morrison • Holman Day
... this hyperbole seem too much for an eastern poet, though some commentators of name strain hard in this place for a new ...
— The Poetical Works of Edward Young, Volume 2 • Edward Young
... compounded of Puritan loathing, poetic scorn, and wellbred shrinking from the vulgarity of the green-room. And it is clear that before the last plays, Luria and A Soul's Tragedy, were published his old stage ambition had entirely vanished. It was not altogether hyperbole (in any case the hyperbole was wholly unconscious) when he spoke of her as a new medium to which his sight was gradually becoming adjusted, "seeing all things, ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... now and then, and indeed surprisingly often, Christ finds a word that transcends all common-place morality; every now and then he quits the beaten track to pioneer the unexpressed, and throws out a pregnant and magnanimous hyperbole; for it is only by some bold poetry of thought that men can be strung up above the level of everyday conceptions to take a broader look upon experience or accept some higher principle of conduct. To a man who is of the same mind that was in Christ, who stands at some centre not too far from his, ...
— Lay Morals • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Wallenstein; 'the very savage drinks not with the victim, into whose breast he means to plunge a sword.' Danton was warned that Robespierre was plotting his arrest. 'If I thought he had the bare idea,' said Danton with something of Gargantuan hyperbole, 'I would eat his bowels out.' Such was the disdain with which the 'giant of the mighty bone and bold emprise' thought of our meagre-hearted pedant. The truth is that in the stormy and distracted times of politics, and perhaps in all times, contempt ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 1 of 3) - Essay 1: Robespierre • John Morley
... The hyperbole of bores it is, to bore Congress for a hundred thousand dollars to go to the Pole! If Captain HALL wants adventure, let him travel to the Halls of the MONTEZUMAS. If he wishes only to be left out in the cold, let him ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 6, May 7, 1870 • Various
... circus tent, and who still performed in public the tricks of a mountebank! That this man had power, Stephen granted ungrudgingly; but it was power over the undisciplined, the half-educated, the mentally untrained. It was power, as John Benham had once remarked with a touch of hyperbole, over ...
— One Man in His Time • Ellen Glasgow
... Fenellan; and he was among the principal groups, claiming or making acquaintances, as a lawyer should do. The Concert was complimentarily a topic: Durandarte divine!—did not everybody think so? Everybody did, in default of a term for overtopping it. Our language is poor at hyperbole; our voices are stronger. Gestures and heaven-sent eyeballs invoke to display the ineffable. Where was Durandarte now? Gone; already gone; off with the Luciani for evening engagements; he came simply to oblige his dear friend Mr. Radnor. Cheque fifty guineas: hardly more on both sides ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... career[393]. The later legend has not distorted the old narrative. It is possible that all its incidents may be founded on stories known to the compilers of the Pitakas, though this is not at present demonstrable, but they are embellished by an unstinted use of the supernatural and of the hyperbole usual in Indian poetry. The youthful Buddha moves through showers of flowers and an atmosphere crowded with attendant deities. He cannot even go to school without an escort of ten thousand children and a hundred thousand ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, Vol I. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... I would relieve him with my queen; till he had exhausted all the coin in the purse of his resolution, and expended all the arrows of the quiver of his argument. "Take heed and retreat not from the orator's attack, for nothing is left him but metaphor and hyperbole. Wield thy polemics and law citations, for the wordy rhetorician made a show of arms over his gate, but has not a soldier within his fort":—At length, having no syllogism left, I made him crouch in mental submission. He stretched forth the arm of violence, and began with vain abuse. As ...
— Persian Literature, Volume 2, Comprising The Shah Nameh, The - Rubaiyat, The Divan, and The Gulistan • Anonymous
... successive waves into Northern and Central India. The last and greatest of the Hindu kingdoms of Southern India did not succumb to the sword of Islam till 1565, and the splendid ruins of Vijianagar bear out, if we make allowance for oriental hyperbole, the contemporary testimony of a Persian Ambassador that "the pupil of the eye has never seen a place like it and the ear of intelligence has never been informed that there existed anything to equal it in the whole world." The Moslem conquerors laid Vijianagar low. But, by ...
— India, Old and New • Sir Valentine Chirol
... never satisfying it. He, too, made a "ladder of his observations to climb to God." He, too, was "free from vice, because he had no occasion to employ it." "Such gifts," said the turbulent Bishop Atterbury of him, "I did not think had been the portion of any but angels." After this it is no hyperbole to say, as Earle does of the contemplative man, "He has learnt all can here be taught him, and comes now to ...
— Microcosmography - or, a Piece of the World Discovered; in Essays and Characters • John Earle
... presence went by like a dream that we would fain have last forever. She was not thin, he thought; she was slender; in love with love, and loverless; and delicate in spite of her strength. Her foibles, exaggerated by her manner, took his fancy; for youth sets out with a love of hyperbole, that infirmity of noble souls. He did not so much as see that her cheeks were faded, that the patches of color on the cheek-bone were faded and hardened to a brick-red by listless days and a certain amount of ailing health. His imagination fastened at once on the glowing ...
— Two Poets - Lost Illusions Part I • Honore de Balzac
... nothing in common, but the name, the outward form, and the mythological materials; and yet they seem to have been composed with the obvious purpose of surpassing them; in which attempt they succeed as much as a hollow hyperbole would in competition with a most fervent truth. Every tragical common-place is worried out to the last gasp; all is phrase; and even the most common remark is forced and stilted. A total poverty of sentiment is dressed out with wit and acuteness. There is fancy in them, or at least a ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... that men and women may unhindered enter. This essay aims to stand as a porter at the gate. We shall never overestimate Shakespeare, because we can not. Some men and things lie beyond the danger of hyperbole. No exaggeration is possible concerning them, seeing they transcend all dreams. Space can not be conceived by the most luxuriant imagination, holding, as it does, all worlds, and capable of holding another universe besides, and with ...
— A Hero and Some Other Folks • William A. Quayle
... This too is probably hyperbole, but Vespasian may have owed his command in Germany to the ...
— Tacitus: The Histories, Volumes I and II • Caius Cornelius Tacitus
... government I not only never received remuneration, nor ever expected it; but I was never honoured with a single acknowledgment, or expression of satisfaction. Yet the retrospect is far from painful or matter of regret. I am not indeed silly enough to take as any thing more than a violent hyperbole of party debate, Mr. Fox's assertion that the late war (I trust that the epithet is not prematurely applied) was a war produced by the Morning Post; or I should be proud to have the words inscribed on my tomb. As little do I regard the circumstance, that I was a specified object ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... resolutely to produce a practical refutation of it. Their first and fullest success was, as might be expected from their notoriously utilitarian character, in practical inventions. In oratory, notwithstanding a tendency to more than Milesian floridness and hyperbole, they have taken no mean stand among the free nations of christendom. In history, despite the disadvantages arising from the scarcity of large libraries, old records, and other appliances of the historiographer, they have produced some books which are acknowledged to be well worthy ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 3, August, 1850. • Various
... and personal feelings, rises to the sublimity of duty, and, ministering to the wants of another with an unselfish vigilance almost perfect, earns that meed of praise from men, which from time to time persists, in grateful hyperbole, to liken her ...
— A Flat Iron for a Farthing - or Some Passages in the Life of an only Son • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... his study. "Splendid character head. Regular Dutch beauty. But hard—eh?—a trifle hard in the grain. Eyes that tell you nothing. Mouth set like a stone. Never rambles in her talk. Never speculates or exaggerates for fun. Never runs into hyperbole—the more fool some other folks! Speaks to the point or ...
— The Desert and The Sown • Mary Hallock Foote
... Louis XIV. suggests ultra-lavishness in life and taste; a time when French society, surfeited with pleasure, demanded a stimulus of continual novelty in current literature. The natural result was preciosite, hyperbole, falsetto sentiment, which ranked the unusual above the natural, clever conceit above careful workmanship. It was tainted with artificiality, and now seems ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... in literature, one which—to reverse the contrast just made—annihilates Dickens's caricature thereof in A Tale of Two Cities. The single-handed defence of La Tourgue by "L'Imanus" has of course a good deal of the hyperbole which began with Quasimodo's similar act in Notre-Dame; but the reader who cannot "let himself go" with it is to be pitied. Nowhere is Hugo's child-worship more agreeably shown than in the three first chapters of the ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... exaggerate," said Sam in a remonstrative tone. "Hyperbole is very objectionable, especially in young men. You know that if you were tied to a huge gridiron over a slow fire, you would be more miserable ...
— The Battery and the Boiler - Adventures in Laying of Submarine Electric Cables • R.M. Ballantyne
... splendour of execution in detached passages—the Elizabethan drama from Sackville to Shirley stands alone in the history of the world. The absurd overestimate which has sometimes been made of its individual practitioners, the hyperbole of the language which has been used to describe them, the puerile and almost inconceivable folly of some of their scholiasts and parasitic students, find a certain excuse in this truth—a truth which will only ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... Night Thoughts is simply Young himself "writ large"—a didactic poet, who "lectures" mankind in the antithetic hyperbole of mortal and immortal joys, earth and the stars, hell and heaven, and expects the tribute of inexhaustible applause. Young has no conception of religion as anything else than egoism turned heavenward; and he does not merely imply this, he insists ...
— George Eliot; A Critical Study of Her Life, Writings & Philosophy • George Willis Cooke
... midst of heaven about a whole day, so that "there was no day like that before it or after it, that the Lord hearkened unto the voice of a man." Some have sought to explain the whole passage as a quotation from "the book of Jasher" expressed in the language of poetic hyperbole; and they have compared with it such poetic amplifications as those contained in Psa. 18:7-16; Hab., chap. 3, etc. But this interpretation is forced and unnatural; and besides this, there remains the analogous event of which we have a double record in 2 Kings 20:8-11; ...
— Companion to the Bible • E. P. Barrows
... have a dreadful suspicion they are not gentlemen. Are they ladies? Did I ever meet a Burgess, I wonder, coming through the rye? At all events, after so authoritative a statement of its social position, I feel that to speak of Literature as a profession would be an hyperbole. ...
— Some Private Views • James Payn |
