"Hyperbole" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... little by our argument of scandal. He is bold to object,(430) "Where one is offended with our practice of kneeling, twenty, I may say ten thousand, are offended with your refusal." O adventurous arithmetic! O huge hyperbole! O desultorious declamation! O roving rethoric! O ...
— The Works of Mr. George Gillespie (Vol. 1 of 2) • George Gillespie
... yet in the old French monarchy that monstrous practice created the only corporation able to resist the king. Official corruption, which would ruin a commonwealth, serves in Russia as a salutary relief from the pressure of absolutism. There are conditions in which it is scarcely a hyperbole to say that slavery itself is a stage on the road to freedom. Therefore we are not so much concerned this evening with the dead letter of edicts and of statutes as with the living thoughts of men. A century ago it was perfectly well known that whoever had ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... as the most important and those oftenest used are, Simile, Metaphor, Personification, Allegory, Synechdoche, Metonymy, Exclamation, Hyperbole, Apostrophe, Vision, Antithesis, ...
— How to Speak and Write Correctly • Joseph Devlin
... 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, ...
— The Life of Buddha and Its Lessons • H.S. Olcott
... graceful lyrics by the same writer have been published by Francisco Rodriguez Marin. Cervantes describes Barahona as "one of the best poets not only in Spain, but in the whole world"; this is friendly hyperbole. Nevertheless Barahona has high merits: poetic imagination, ingenious fancy, and an exceptional mastery of the methods transplanted to Spain from Italy. His Angelica has been reproduced in facsimile (New York, 1904) by ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 3 - "Banks" to "Bassoon" • Various
... and enriched if, after facing the perils of navigation in strange waters, the possible hostility of native rulers, and the still greater danger from European rivals, half his ships returned. The last statement is no hyperbole; of 9 ships sent to the East from Amsterdam in 1598, four came back, and just half of the 22 sent out from ...
— A History of Sea Power • William Oliver Stevens and Allan Westcott
... speechless eloquence in such a scene. The figure of a quiet slumber is no hyperbole, but a sober verity. As the gentle smile of a foretasted heaven is seen playing on the marble lips—the rays gilding the mountain tops after the golden sun has gone down—what more befitting reflection than this, "So giveth He His ...
— Memories of Bethany • John Ross Macduff
... not then this hyperbole seem too much for an eastern poet, though some commentators of name strain hard in this place for a new construction, ...
— The Poetical Works of Edward Young, Volume 2 • Edward Young
... than few stands the author of "The Revenger's Tragedy." The great scene of the temptation and the triumph of Castiza would alone be enough to give evidence, not adequate merely but ample, that such praise as this is no hyperbole of sympathetic enthusiasm, but simply the accurate expression of an indisputable fact. No lyrist, no satirist, could have excelled in fiery flow of rhetoric the copious and impetuous eloquence of the lines, at once ...
— The Age of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... conferred upon that loyal Moslem Kheyred-Din Barbarossa, who, in the words of the Padishah, "abandoning a sterile independence, sought in all the bloody hazards of his life nought but the glory of God and His Prophet" To us this hyperbole, addressed to a pirate, seems merely ridiculous, but in those days of fanaticism the beliefs of men, both Christians and Moslems, are something which it is impossible for us to realise. On either side the way of salvation was the path of conquest, ...
— Sea-Wolves of the Mediterranean • E. Hamilton Currey
... punitive force. In 1690 he was at Montreal, lending his aid in the defence of that part of the colony against raiding bands of Iroquois which were once again proving a menace. At Boucherville, in 1694, one historian tells us with characteristic hyperbole, Durantaye killed ten Iroquois with his own hand. Mohawks were not, as a rule, so easy to catch or kill. Two years later he commanded a detachment of troops and militiamen in operations against his ...
— The Seigneurs of Old Canada: - A Chronicle of New-World Feudalism • William Bennett Munro
... 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 classics, I know about as much as most school-boys ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Letters and Journals, Vol. 1 • Lord Byron, Edited by Rowland E. Prothero
... affirmed that the housework to be done at The Shrubbery was nothing, she was guilty of hyperbole. All the same, the house was an easy one, and such labour as its upkeep entailed melted, beneath the perfectly organized attention of herself, Anne, and Lyveden, as snow beneath the midday sun. The three had more ...
— Anthony Lyveden • Dornford Yates
... 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 ...
— Robert Toombs - Statesman, Speaker, Soldier, Sage • Pleasant A. Stovall
... now and then, and indeed surprisingly often, Christ finds a word that transcends all commonplace 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 ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... should be regarded as a permanent 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 and anxiety of ...
— Stephen Arnold Douglas • William Garrott Brown
... Oriental that you 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
... last 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 ...
— Odes and Carmen Saeculare of Horace • Horace
... with intense conviction and hyperbole, more excusable than his old prudence and fickleness, "Anything! Mad, you could do everything with me, and with little Bill and Bob. We should no longer be egotistical and frivolous, with you to keep us right, you good, ...
— Girlhood and Womanhood - The Story of some Fortunes and Misfortunes • Sarah Tytler
... he repeats. "You use strong language, Inez. But then you have an excitable sort of nature, and were ever inclined to hyperbole; and it is ...
— A Terrible Secret • May Agnes Fleming
... of Tobias, 4, 11, ought to be received: Alms free from every sin and from death. We will not say that this is hyperbole, although it ought thus to be received, so as not to detract from the praise of Christ, whose prerogative it is to free from sin and death. But we must come back to the rule that without Christ the doctrine of the Law is ...
— The Apology of the Augsburg Confession • Philip Melanchthon
... penning-up. I have spoken of Andriaovsky's contempt for such as had the conception of their work that it was something they "did" as distinct from something they "were"; and unless I succeed in making it plain that, not as a mere figure of speech and loose hyperbole, but starkly and literally, Andriaovsky was everything he did, my ...
— Widdershins • Oliver Onions
... intolerance for every form of democracy. Poor white people have not the slightest chance of his good opinion. The pedigree and history of his master's family possess an epic dignity in his imagination; and the liberty he takes with facts concerning them amounts to a grand poetical hyperbole. He represents their wealth in past times to have amounted to something of a fabulous superfluity, and their magnificence so unbounded, that he stares at you in describing it, as if its ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 6, No. 33, July, 1860 • Various
... antiquarians attach much importance, as showing the ideas then prevalent in reference to geography, and the point at which the art of ship-building had then arrived. Of course due allowance must be made for Homer's tendency to indulge in hyperbole. ...
— Man on the Ocean - A Book about Boats and Ships • R.M. Ballantyne
... Prussia. And every lady expects attention and politeness as a matter of course, equally as a matter of course did she expect the assiduities and some manifestation, even stronger than gallantry, and treated it merely as a matter of course. Really, without an hyperbole, she was a woman to whom an appearance of devotion might be excusable, and looked upon more as a tribute to the abstract spirit of beauty and its divine Creator, than as a sensual ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... Obedience is better than sacrifice, or Hosea by The Knowledge of God is more than burnt-offerings.(299) Nor are there grounds for thinking that the Prophet had in view only the Ten Commandments; while finally to claim that he spoke in hyperbole is a forlorn hope of an argument. In answer to all these evasions it is enough to point out that the question is not merely that of the value of sacrifice, but whether during the Exodus the God of Israel gave ...
— Jeremiah • George Adam Smith
... which the Writer had turned from the genuine 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 them; the French Writer goes deliberately in search of them: ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... in his last illness, he asked Lockhart one day to read to him. "From what book shall I read?" said Lockhart. "There is but one book," was Scott's answer. Those who have sought the "power to become the sons of God" will understand this hyperbole of the most healthy human mind in modern English literature. Tested by experience there is indeed, in the wide range of the literature of power, no book to be mentioned with the Bible for feeding the life of God in man. Our fathers found this true, and ...
— The Right and Wrong Uses of the Bible • R. Heber Newton
... shaped. Something was required to 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 ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 7 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... imagine I have dealt in hyperbole, or hand-illumined the facts: I have merely stated some simple truths about the early ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 12 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Scientists • Elbert Hubbard
... prospect of censure or disgrace. He knew the character of the English people—rash, impatient, and capricious; elevated to exultation by the least gleam of success, dejected even to despondency by the most inconsiderable frown of adverse fortune; sanguine, even to childish hyperbole, in applauding those servants of the public who have prospered in their undertakings; clamorous, to a degree of prosecution, against those who have miscarried in their endeavours, without any investigation ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... warriors slaughtered in the great swamp fight could not be replaced; but, as Roger Williams told the Indians, there were still ten thousand white men who could carry muskets, and should all these be slain, he added, with a touch of hyperbole, the Great Father in England could send ten thousand more. For the moment Williams seems to have cherished a hope that his great influence with the savages might induce them to submit to terms of peace while there was yet a remnant to be saved; but they were now as little ...
— The Beginnings of New England - Or the Puritan Theocracy in its Relations to Civil and Religious Liberty • John Fiske
... turned a flock of Dorset ewes into one of these orchards, the buyer complained—the lower branches being heavily laden, and within a few feet of the ground—that he had watched, "Them old yows holding down bunches of plums with their harns for t'others to eat." This I imagine was in the nature of hyperbole, and not intended to be ...
— Grain and Chaff from an English Manor • Arthur H. Savory
... game for mighty likely it's three hours, an' no one 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
... 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 assembling together ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 378, April, 1847 • Various
... 'This wonder that has filled me hath arisen from an ordinance that looks like a hyperbole, and from its paradoxical statement for the comprehension of the people. The declaration of the Vedas seems to be untrue. But why should the Vedas say an untruth? It has been said that there are three tracks which constitute the best vows of a man ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 4 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... 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
... men, as did 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 ...
— National Epics • Kate Milner Rabb
... 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 ...
— Edgar Allan Poe's Complete Poetical Works • Edgar Allan Poe
... 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 ...
— A Publisher and His Friends • Samuel Smiles
... of course, was for a time impossible. Martyrdom was followed by canonization, and the popular heart could not be blamed for overflowing in hyperbole. The fallen chief "was Washington, he was Moses, and there were not wanting even those who likened him to the God and Redeemer of all the earth. These latter thought they discovered in his early origin, his kindly nature, his benevolent precepts, and the homely anecdotes ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith
... friends of the prodigious sacrifice she was about to make for her brother and his family, as if it had been the cutting off of a hand or the plucking out of an eye. To have heard her, anyone unaccustomed to the hyperbole of fashionable language would have deemed Botany Bay the nearest possible point of destination. Parting from her fashionable acquaintances was tearing herself from all she loved; quitting London was bidding adieu to the world. Of course there could be no society where ...
— Marriage • Susan Edmonstone Ferrier
... 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 ...
— The Kempton-Wace Letters • Jack London
... of vivid hyperbole being exhausted, Mrs. Lester and I expressed ourselves simply to the same effect. We turned, heedful no longer of the tides, and travelled delightfully along the Artichoke road until we reached a ...
— Vesty of the Basins • Sarah P. McLean Greene
... their native 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
... arise. Such a one we believe was Jesus of Nazareth, the most exalted religious genius whom God ever sent upon the earth; in himself an embodied revelation; humanity in its divinest phase, 'God manifest in the flesh,' according to eastern hyperbole; an exemplar given in an early age of the world to show what man may and should become in the course of ages; in his progress towards the realization of his destiny; an individual gifted with a grand, clear ...
— The Christian Foundation, Or, Scientific and Religious Journal, - Volume I, No. 9. September, 1880 • Various
... tapering pine! Well, we had the satisfaction for a time of claiming the tallest structure in the world; and now that the new Tower of Babel which has sprung up in Paris has killed that pretention, I think we shall feel and speak more modestly about our stone hyperbole, our materialization of the American love of the superlative. We have the higher civilization among us, and we must try to keep down the forth-putting instincts of the lower. We do not want to see our national monument placarded as "the greatest show ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... whenever he put my king in check, 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 ...
— Persian Literature, Volume 2, Comprising The Shah Nameh, The - Rubaiyat, The Divan, and The Gulistan • Anonymous
... I want most awfully to do Bismarck. He looks SO splendid this morning, so FIERCE. He's almost as big as a lion.' And the child chuckled sardonically at her own hyperbole. 'He's a ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... civilization of each. Moorish influence was predominant in Spain—Portugal retained more deeply the Roman stamp. This is easily seen in the literature of the two countries. Spanish ballads and plays show the Eastern delight in hyperbole, the Eastern fertility of invention: Portuguese literature is completely classic in spirit, avoiding all exaggeration, all offences against taste, and confining itself to classic forms, such as the pastoral, the epic and the sonnet. Many Moorish customs survive in Portugal to this day, but they ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, October, 1880 • Various
... "Hyperbole aside," says I, "do you know of any immediate system of buncoing the community out of a dollar or two except by applying to the Salvation Army or having a fit ...
— Strictly Business • O. Henry
... wisest and the most loving of all human beings; and have attributed such language as that in the text, which—translate it as you will—ascribes absolute divinity, and nothing less, to our Lord Jesus Christ—they have attributed it, I say, to some fondness for Oriental hyperbole, and mystic Theosophy, in the minds of the Apostles. Others, again, have gone further, and been, I think, more logically honest. They have perceived that our Lord Jesus Christ Himself, as His words are reported, attributed divinity to Himself, just as much as did His ...
— Westminster Sermons - with a Preface • Charles Kingsley
... enemies!" Mark you not simply those who do not happen to be your friends, but your enemies, your positive and active enemies. Either this is a mere Oriental hyperbole, a bit of verbal extravagance, meaning only that we should, in so far as we can, abate our animosities, or else it is sincere and literal. Outside of certain cases of intimate individual relation, it ...
— Human Traits and their Social Significance • Irwin Edman
... best pictures of the ancienne noblesse 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 third volume. And, sinking particulars ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... deliberately and advisedly to be characterised 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 ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey, Vol. 2 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... that I considered it an epoch in my life when I visited it for the first time; after the fall of Napoleon, an event which opened the Continent to travellers. Indeed I think it is one among several cities to which an extreme hyperbole has been applied—'See Rome and die:' but in your case I would propose an emendation and say, See Rome as a bride, and live henceforth as a ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... rhetoric. 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 ...
— Options • O. Henry
... though the Muses have beene dead and gone I know they'll finde a Resurrection. Tis vaine to prayse; they're to themselves a glory, And silence is our sweetest Oratory. For he that names but FLETCHER must needs be Found guilty of a loud hyperbole. His fancy so transcendently aspires, He showes himselfe a witt, who but admires. Here are no volumes stuft with cheverle sence, The very Anagrams of Eloquence, Nor long-long-winded sentences that be, Being rightly spelld, but Witts Stenographie. Nor words, as voyd of Reason, ...
— The Works of Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher in Ten Volumes - Volume I. • Beaumont and Fletcher
... sand-grouse," and "speak not falsely, for the Kata sayeth sooth," is Komayt's saying. It is an emblem of swiftness: when the brigand poet Shanfara boasts, "The ash-coloured Katas can drink only my leavings, after hastening all night to slake their thirst in the morning," it is a hyperbole boasting of his speed. In Sind it is called the "rock pigeon" and it is not unlike a grey partridge ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 4 • Richard F. Burton
... insignificant youth on whom the clerk of the court bestowed in baptism his Norman name of "Exupere," Madame Latournelle is still so surprised at becoming his mother, at the age of thirty-five years and seven months, that she would still provide him, if it were necessary, with her breast and her milk,—an hyperbole which alone can fully express her impassioned maternity. "How handsome he is, that son of mine!" she says to her little friend Modeste, as they walk to church, with the beautiful Exupere in front of them. "He is like you," Modeste ...
— Modeste Mignon • Honore de Balzac
... singing comedienne, Prima Donna and Star, direct from her unusual and most distinguished triumph at the Palace Theater, London; and a dozen more of the younger and more popular people of the stage, all adorned, with adjectives and hyperbole. Down at the bottom of the list with a trembling pencil he wrote: "Harry Barnes, Singing and Talking." Then he shook hands with the secretary of the organization and walked back to his boarding-house in a ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. XXXI, No. 3, July 1908. • Various
... enallage[obs3], catachresis[obs3]; metonymy[Gram], synecdoche[Semant]; autonomasia|!, irony, figurativeness &c. adj.; image, imagery; metalepsis[obs3], type, anagoge[obs3], simile, personification, prosopopoeia[obs3], allegory, apologue[obs3], parable, fable; allusion, adumbration; application. exaggeration , hyperbole &c. 549. association, association of ideas (analogy) 514a V. employ -metaphor &c. n.; personify, allegorize, adumbrate, shadow forth, apply, allude to. Adj. metaphorical, figurative, catachrestical[obs3], typical, tralatitious[obs3], parabolic, allegorical, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... Pericles to the great tribunal before which he urged his defence, "that I have expended too much, charge the sums to my account, not yours—but on this condition, let the edifices be inscribed with my name, not that of the Athenian people." This mode of defence, though perhaps but an oratorical hyperbole [262], conveyed a rebuke which the Athenians were an audience calculated to answer but in one way—they dismissed the accusation, and ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... the recollection that the mere sight of that terrible majesty had struck him to the ground, and had left an ever-during brand of pain and disfigurement on his person. I shall just add, that in Second Corinthians xii. 7, the words, {te hyperbole ton apokalypseon} may with quite as much propriety be construed with {edothe moi skolops te sarki}, as with {hina me huperairomai}; the meaning being thus given,—"and that I might not be exalted, a thorn in the flesh [caused] by the exceeding greatness (for this rather than 'abundance' seems ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... the messenger, with presents more valueless, and an assurance of friendship more sonorous, more complete in rhetoric and aptness of hyperbole, and when the messenger had gone Bosambo showed his appreciation of N'gori's love by doubling the guard about the Ochori city and sending a strong picket under his chief headman ...
— Bones - Being Further Adventures in Mr. Commissioner Sanders' Country • Edgar Wallace
... 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
... said Lucien to Blondet, hoping to rid himself of this mob, which threatened to increase, "it seems to me that you need not work up hyperbole and parable to attack an old friend as if he were a booby. To-morrow night at Lointier's——" he cried, seeing a woman come by, whom ...
— Scenes from a Courtesan's Life • Honore de Balzac
... had not, however, been in vain. It is no hyperbole of the historian of the reformed churches, when he likens their cells to five pulpits, from which the Word of God resounded through the entire city and much farther.[587] The results of their heroic fortitude, and of the wide dissemination of copies ...
— The Rise of the Hugenots, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Henry Martyn Baird
... style of fashion, that is of effrontery, as even the fools by whom they are aped, or the lawyers and statesmen themselves by whom they are defended. This I own is a bold assertion; and is perhaps a hyperbole! Yes, yes: it is comparing mole hills to mountains. But ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft
... likely places in search of a pipe and tobacco, but without avail. I even extended my researches into the pantry, and thence into the sacred precincts of the front parlour. But the tobacco-famine raged equally everywhere. The place was a residence, but by no stretch of hyperbole could you ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... 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 ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 27, January, 1860 • Various
... thus be readily made during a day, and it is indisputably one of the finest mountain sights in Europe. As Lord Bute, (quoted in the Tour Through the Pyrenees,) cried when there, many years ago, in old-time hyperbole, "If I were now at the extremity of India, and suspected the existence of what I see at this moment, I should immediately leave, in order to enjoy and admire it." Perhaps this sentiment should merit consideration from, other seekers of noble scenery; it ...
— A Midsummer Drive Through The Pyrenees • Edwin Asa Dix
... the tones of violent generations,—of men whose intensity, though yielding extraordinary beauty and grandeur, yielded also obscurity and extravagance; men whom the love of women too often impelled to utter fantastic hyperbole, and the love of honor to glorify preposterous adventures; quarrelsome men, who assailed their opponents with rancorous personalities; doctrinaires, who employed their fiery energy of mind in the creation of rigid systems of religion and government; uncompromising men, who devoted to ...
— English Poets of the Eighteenth Century • Selected and Edited with an Introduction by Ernest Bernbaum
... 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 heaven to ...
— Microcosmography - or, a Piece of the World Discovered; in Essays and Characters • John Earle
... of foreigners the Irish are by far the most numerous. Light-hearted, wrongheaded, impulsive, uncalculating, with an Oriental love of hyperbole, and too often a common dislike of cold water and of that gem which the fable tells us rests at the bottom of the well, the Celtic elements of their character do not readily accommodate themselves to those of the hard, cool, self-relying ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... 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
... to a man's, whose worth, Without hyperbole, I thus may praise; One at least studious of deserving well, And, to speak truth, indeed deserving well. Potential merit stands for actual, Where only opportunity doth want, Not will, nor power; both which in him ...
— Cynthia's Revels • Ben Jonson
... which befell the early Cumry; and whosoever doubts its power for the purpose of abstruse reasoning, let him study a work called Rhetorick, by Master William Salisbury, written about the year 1570, and I think he will admit that there is no hyperbole, or, as a Welshman would call it, gorwireb, in what I have said with respect to the capabilities ...
— Wild Wales - Its People, Language and Scenery • George Borrow
... which 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 ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, February 1844 - Volume 23, Number 2 • Various
... Pope, or at least to his suggestions. It resembles "The Dunciad" in containing more bitterness than humour. Examples are given of the "Pert style," the "Alamode" style, the "Finical style." The exceptions taken to such hyperbole as the following, seem to be the ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... plethoric, soft movement of a subsiding pillow. The puckers of his cumbrous eyelids drew a little closer together; his bilious eyes peered out cautiously between them, like sallow assassins watching through curtained windows; for a minute or so he kept up what might without hyperbole be called a ...
— Stories by American Authors (Volume 4) • Constance Fenimore Woolson
... morrow "The 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 ...
— William Adolphus Turnpike • William Banks
... admirable man of action, a fiery and impassioned orator, the highly polemical historian of the Church, after the manner of Bossuet in his History of Variations. Saint Basil, termed by his admirers "the Great," without there being much hyperbole in the qualification, was an incomparable orator. He, as it were, reigned over Eastern Christianity, thanks to his word, his skill, and his courage. Even to us his works possess charm. He intermingled the finest ideas of Plato and of Christianity in the happiest and most ...
— Initiation into Literature • Emile Faguet
... weighed his expressions when he spoke of the debasement of morals among the Irish. It is no hyperbole to speak of the nation as a martyr; a martyr in any sense of the word: to the Christian, a Christian martyr. And yet it is by that fact guilty of immorality, or, as he puts it, debased in morals! The point is not worth arguing. But in contrasting the two nations, the nation debased and the nation ...
— Irish Race in the Past and the Present • Aug. J. Thebaud
... the art of advertising better than Barnum. Knowing that mammon is ever caught with glare, he took pains that his posters should be larger, his transparencies more brilliant, his puffing more persistent than anybody elses. And if he resorted to hyperbole at times in his advertisements, it was always his boast that no one ever went away from his Museum, without having received the worth of his money. It used to amuse Mr. Barnum later in life, to relate some of the unique advertising dodges ...
— A Unique Story of a Marvellous Career. Life of Hon. Phineas T. • Joel Benton
... expressed the wish. He did not, however, give himself this trouble; and we think he was right. The truth is, that, of all the Spanish historians of the Conquest of Mexico, Las Casas is the one who has indulged most largely in hyperbole. Writing, with little personal knowledge, in support of a theory which required him to magnify the ruin accomplished by the Conquistadores, he has exaggerated the population of the Mexican empire, the number and size of its towns, and the evidences of its civilization. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 19, May, 1859 • Various
... 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 the dignity of her person, assisted by the dignity ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... 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
... time to make the calculation, but I suppose that the daily literature by which we now are principally nourished, is so large in issue that though St. John's "even the world itself could not contain the books which should be written" may be still hyperbole, it is nevertheless literally true that the world might be wrapped in the books which are written; and that the sheets of paper covered with type on any given subject, interesting to the modern mind, (say the prospects of the Claimant,) ...
— Val d'Arno • John Ruskin
... der Thiere Trieb,' says 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 is a ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 1 of 3) - Essay 1: Robespierre • John Morley
... every day during his illness. Good Mrs. Lewin had taken the letters to him, and had brought her his replies. He had not written so often, or at such length, as she, and had pleaded the languor of convalescence as his excuse; but all his billets-doux had been in the same delicious hyperbole, the language of the Pays du Tendre. She sat silent while her visitors talked about him, plucking a reputation as mercilessly as a kitchen wench plucks a fowl. He was gone. He had left the country deep in debt. It was his landlord who ...
— London Pride - Or When the World Was Younger • M. E. Braddon
... 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 of ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... people,—a limitation which is also presupposed by the description in the 11th and subsequent verses. In iii. 12, the preservation of a small remnant amidst the general destruction had been promised. The greater number of interpreters, in order to reconcile this apparent contradiction, assume an hyperbole in vers. 1-4. But this assumption is certainly erroneous. The ground of this great copiousness,—the reason why the prophet represents the same thought in aspects so various,—is evidently to prevent every idea of an hyperbole,—to show that the words are to be taken in all their strictness ...
— Christology of the Old Testament: And a Commentary on the Messianic Predictions, v. 1 • Ernst Wilhelm Hengstenberg
... 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 ...
— Guns of the Gods • Talbot Mundy
... 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,' ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Volume I (of 3) - Essay 4: Macaulay • John Morley
... prosaic 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 ...
— Trips to the Moon • Lucian
... almost the entire world, had trodden the soil of Spain only a few hours, when disembarking in Barcelona from the transatlantic liner which he had commanded. The Spaniards inspired her both with fear and attraction. A noble gravity reposed in the depths of their ardent hyperbole. ...
— Mare Nostrum (Our Sea) - A Novel • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... returned the other, "or what remains of him after a well-deserved experience of poverty and law. But in you, Challoner, I can perceive no change; and time may be said, without hyperbole, to write no wrinkle on ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 5 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... anything could mitigate the distress of the American people in their present affliction, it might surely be the sympathy which is expressed by the people of this country. We are not using the language of hyperbole in describing the manifestation of feeling as unexampled. Nothing like it has been witnessed in our generation.... But President Lincoln was only the chief of a foreign State, and of a State with which we were not infrequently in diplomatic or political ...
— Great Britain and the American Civil War • Ephraim Douglass Adams
... I was legitimately using language that might be called exaggerated. Hyperbole is, I believe, the term grammarians use for it. I didn't expect you, dear, to take me up so literally. It isn't like you. You generally have more imagination. As a matter of fact, Davenant's offer was that of ...
— The Street Called Straight • Basil King
... part in Byron himself. His weariness was a genuine outcome of the influence of the time upon a character consumed by passion. His lot was cast among spent forces, and, while it is no hyperbole to say that he was himself the most enormous force of his time, he was only half conscious of this, if indeed he did not always inwardly shrink from crediting his own power and strength, as so many strong men habitually do, in spite of noisy and perpetual self-assertion. ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. I - Essay 3: Byron • John Morley
... Pallas that stands on the mantelpiece, and said bitterly, 'Edna Earl has no more heart than that marble Athena.' Whereupon I replied, 'Take care, Gordon. I notice that of late you seem inclined to deal rather too freely in hyperbole. Edna's heart may resemble the rich veins of gold, which in some mines run not near the surface but deep in the masses of quartz. Because you can not obtain it, you have no right to declare that it does not exist. You will probably live ...
— St. Elmo • Augusta J. Evans
... to 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 one)—that flowers only flourish rightly ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... weather is very hot now, and the soil chalk, and the dust white, I assure you it is very difficult, powdered as both are all over, to distinguish a tree from a hairdresser. Lest this should sound like a travelling hyperbole, I must advertise your lordship, that there is little difference in their heights; for, a tree of thirty years' growth being liable to be marked as royal timber, the proprietors take care not to let their trees live to the age of being enlisted, but burn them, ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole Volume 3 • Horace Walpole
... amity for 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 ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, v. 13 • Various
... petals from a red rose in a vase near her, and tossed them in the air—"these are the real wealth of the world. And Brutus says I am stilted, exaggerated in my conversation, given to metaphor and hyperbole. That is because I dare to express what I feel, and since everywhere I see parables I ...
— The Silver Butterfly • Mrs. Wilson Woodrow
... recurring in the classical poets (cf. e.g. Ovid., Met. xiii. 293, immunemque aequoris Arcton, "the Bear that never touches the sea"). The idea that these stars are mostly hidden by clouds, though perpetually in view, is a poetic hyperbole intended to enhance the uniqueness of the Star ...
— The Hymns of Prudentius • Aurelius Clemens Prudentius
... visitor his impression of the impulse and the spectacle: Said he: "I never saw any thing like it:" language which seems curiously undertoned, considering its application; but from the taciturn Commander it was equivalent to a superlative or hyperbole from the talkative. ...
— Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War • Herman Melville
... away, as they else might be, by an unsophisticated orator, Grammar and Logic are necessary to the perfection of Rhetoric. Not that Rhetoric is in bondage to those other sciences; for foreign idioms and such figures as the ellipsis, the anacoluthon, the oxymoron, the hyperbole, and violent inversions have their place in the magnificent style; but authors unacquainted with Grammar and Logic are not likely to place such figures well and wisely. Indeed, common idioms, though both grammatically ...
— Logic - Deductive and Inductive • Carveth Read
... had has been taken from me. In fact I stand unmasked. An English reviewer writing in a literary journal, the very name of which is enough to put contradiction to sleep, has said of my writing, "What is there, after all, in Professor Leacock's humour but a rather ingenious mixture of hyperbole and myosis?" ...
— Further Foolishness • Stephen Leacock
... quiet, unobtrusive, impeccable "seaman." He had a number, what was it? Three-nine-(fool not to write it down!) three-nine-something. Was that his number during his last imprisonment? Had he spoken in terrific hyperbole when he admitted that no doubt it was "a picturesque life"? Good God! How blind we had been! And Miss Fraenkel's shot in the dark, was it after all the truth? Had he ...
— Aliens • William McFee
... language to my mind (Still the phrase is wide or 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 show, The plain truth will seem to be A constrain'd hyperbole, And the passion to proceed More from a ...
— Pipe and Pouch - The Smoker's Own Book of Poetry • Various
... Rome a triumphant husband bury his twenty-first wife, who had interred twenty-two of his less sturdy predecessors, (Opp. tom. i. p. 90, ad Gerontiam.) But the ten husbands in a month of the poet Martial, is an extravagant hyperbole, (l. ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 4 • Edward Gibbon
... often themselves the cause of their being misrepresented; there is no country perhaps, in which the habit of deceiving for amusement, or what is termed hoaxing, is so common. Indeed this and the hyperbole constitute the major part of American humour. If they have the slightest suspicion that a foreigner is about to write a book, nothing appears to give them so much pleasure as to try to mislead him; this has constantly been practised upon me, and for all I know, they may in some instances ...
— Diary in America, Series One • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... attach to the phrase of "a perfect gentleman," applying each sentence to his Right Honourable friend with an emphasis that seemed to burst from his heart. To all of the audience, save two, it was an eulogium which the fervent sincerity of the eulogist alone saved from hyperbole. But Levy rubbed his hands, and chuckled inly; and Egerton hung his head, and moved restlessly on his seat. Every word that Harley uttered lodged an arrow in Audley's breast. Amidst the cheers that followed this admirable sketch of the "loyal man," Harley recognized Leonard's enthusiastic voice. ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... 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 Ludwig ...
— Oswald Langdon - or, Pierre and Paul Lanier. A Romance of 1894-1898 • Carson Jay Lee
... 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 exist. And it was her intense ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... George Daniel's singular and precious collection, disposed of in 1864, was an ordinary auctioneer's compilation; except that many of the owner's MSS. notes written on the fly-leaves were introduced by way of whetting the appetites of competitors; and to say that a vein of hyperbole pervaded these remarks is a mild expression; they emanated, we have to remember, from an accountant. The books, however, spoke for themselves. The printed account of them, viewed as a work of reference, must be read cum grano ...
— The Book-Collector • William Carew Hazlitt
... word-perplexity, Or a fit expression find, Or a language to my mind (Still the phrase is wide or 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 show, The plain truth will seem to be A constrained hyperbole, And the passions to proceed More from a mistress than ...
— English Satires • Various |
