"Hyperbole" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... 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 ...
— 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
... was considered as being still more masterly and eloquent, and it was certainly well suited to the taste of French soldiers, who, as Bourrienne remarks, are wonderfully pleased with grandiloquence, metaphor, and hyperbole, though they do not always understand what they mean. Even a French author of some distinction praises this address as something sublime. "The proclamation to the army," says he, "is full of energy: it could not fail to make all military imaginations ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... of conformity; and so he would make us gain 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
... dispatched by the Sultan of my country to obtain information of the countries of Africa; that I wrote in a book accounts of everything I saw, and on my return, would present this book to the Sultan, who would reward me with a high rank—perhaps even that of Grand Vizier. The Orientals deal largely in hyperbole, and scatter numbers and values with the most reckless profusion. The Arabic, like the Hebrew, its sister tongue, and other old original tongues of Man, is a language of roots, and abounds with the boldest metaphors. Now, exaggeration is but the imperfect ...
— The Lands of the Saracen - Pictures of Palestine, Asia Minor, Sicily, and Spain • Bayard Taylor
... 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 ...
— Ralph Waldo Emerson • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... her mouth like crumpled rose-petals, her ivory 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 ...
— The Joyous Adventures of Aristide Pujol • William J. Locke
... 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 ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... halau, where a performance was under way. Admission was conditioned, however, on the utterance of a password at the door. A snatch of song, an oli, denominated mele kahea, or mele wehe puka, was chanted, which, on being recognized by those within, was answered in the same language of hyperbole, and ...
— Unwritten Literature of Hawaii - The Sacred Songs of the Hula • Nathaniel Bright Emerson
... 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
... 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 admiration of ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 5 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... cigarettes. As the strongest arguments would probably make the most lasting impression upon the school child and the best profits for author and bookseller, writers vied with one another in the rhetoric and hyperbole of platform agitation. What effect would it have upon you if you were exhorted frequently during the next eight years to avoid tobacco because a mother once killed a child by washing its head in tobacco ...
— Civics and Health • William H. Allen
... a question that was to be repeated many times in the next few days. It really seemed as though that frantic hyperbole, "blown to atoms," had for once realised itself. There was not a visible particle of Plattner to be seen; not a drop of blood nor a stitch of clothing to be found. Apparently he had been blown clean out of existence and ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... expression, and a both amiable and courteous disposition. One Eyed Dah-veed (as it was pronounced of course) had been in prison at Noyon during the German occupation, which he described fully and without hyperbole—stating that no one could have been more considerate or just than the commander of the invading troops. Dah-veed had seen with his own eyes a French girl extend an apple to one of the common soldiers as the German army entered ...
— The Enormous Room • Edward Estlin Cummings
... Bello Mithridatico. p. 215. Edit. Steph. He, by an hyperbole, makes the pile larger than the apex on ...
— A New System; or, an Analysis of Antient Mythology. Volume I. • Jacob Bryant
... under so common circumstances; their number should be legion! That a fool may occasionally write interesting matter we know; but that a man should write a literary classic, graced by arrangement, selection, expression, is not even paradox but hyperbole run mad. The truth is, Macaulay had no eye for such a complex character as Boswell. Too correct himself, too prone to the cardinal virtues and consistency, to follow one who, by instinct, seemed to anticipate Wendell Holmes' advice—'Don't be consistent, ...
— James Boswell - Famous Scots Series • William Keith Leask
... 39. A HYPERBOLE is an exaggeration in which more is expressed than is intended to be understood. Example.—"I suppose that even the world itself could not contain the books that should be written." John 21:25—meaning that a great number might ...
— A Brief Commentary on the Apocalypse • Sylvester Bliss
... 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. ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft
... wide open, 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 room to spare. Clearly, we can not overestimate ...
— A Hero and Some Other Folks • William A. Quayle
... a movement of pleasant interest, meant to verify his recent gallant promise; but he turned so quickly that his face had no time to come into the kindly conspiracy, and no triumph of hyperbole could have described its ...
— Captivating Mary Carstairs • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... 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 to hold the ...
— Bones - Being Further Adventures in Mr. Commissioner Sanders' Country • Edgar Wallace
... more essential to an understanding of the essence of love, and a better test of it, than the sentiments named by Spencer. He ignores also the absolutely essential traits of individual preference and monopolism, besides coyness, hyperbole, the mixed moods of hope and despair, and purity, with the diverse emotions accompanying them. An effort to trace the evolution of the ingredients of love was first made in my book, though in a fragmentary way, in which respect the present volume ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... 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 ...
— The Apology of the Augsburg Confession • Philip Melanchthon
... scenery into the images of lofty thoughts; 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 partitions of conventialism and expediency; vindicate ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, February 1844 - Volume 23, Number 2 • Various
... 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 seldom has been taken literally. Yet it makes ...
— Human Traits and their Social Significance • Irwin Edman
... acknowledges that their inference is 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 ...
— The Parables of Our Lord • William Arnot
... self-satisfaction that never before had such a thing happened to any one; moreover, he adds, "my wisdom charmed his Majesty, my zeal pleased him, and his Majesty's heart was delighted with me." All this is pure hyperbole, but no one was surprised at it in Egypt; etiquette required that a faithful subject should declare the favours of his sovereign to be something new and unprecedented, even when they presented nothing extraordinary or out of the ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 2 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... 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 Ralph ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. X (of X) - America - II, Index • Various
... Speech.—Sometimes, especially in older rhetorics, the following so-called figures of speech are added to the list already given: irony, hyperbole, antithesis, climax, and interrogation. The two former pertain rather to style, in fact, are qualities of style, while the last two might properly be placed along with kinds of sentences or paragraph development. Since these so-called figures are not all mentioned elsewhere in this ...
— Composition-Rhetoric • Stratton D. Brooks
... 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
... powers of Coleridge, and the corresponding varieties of demand made by them on any one who should aspire to become this many-sided man's biographer. The description is slightly touched with the humorous hyperbole characteristic of its author; but it is in substance just, and I cannot but wish that it were possible, within the limits of a preface, to set out the whole of it in excuse for the many inevitable ...
— English Men of Letters: Coleridge • H. D. Traill
... Grandisonian, "Oh! oh! as good as new to me. Quite as good as new." They were 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 to ...
— Juliana Horatia Ewing And Her Books • Horatia K. F. Eden
... 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 ...
— Mr. Isaacs • F. Marion Crawford
... 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
... the eye; which was given him for higher purposes. It is a strange thing, 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 nothing but in love. Neither is it merely in the phrase; for whereas it hath been well said, that the arch-flatterer, with whom all the petty flatterers have intelligence, is a man's self; certainly the lover is more. For there was never proud man thought ...
— Essays - The Essays Or Counsels, Civil And Moral, Of Francis Ld. - Verulam Viscount St. Albans • Francis Bacon
... tune, and with such exquisite taste, that I was enchanted. Rome is famous for serenades and serenaders; but at this season they are seldom heard. I remember at Venice being wakened in the dead of the night by such delicious music, that (to use a hyperbole common in the mouths of this poetical people) I was "transported to the seventh heaven:" before I could perfectly recollect myself, the music ceased, the inhabitants of the neighbouring houses threw open their casements, and vehemently and enthusiastically applauded, clapping their hands, ...
— The Diary of an Ennuyee • Anna Brownell Jameson
... Bengal reading Gooranamatitejasa is what I adopt. The Bombay reading, Ghoranamapnitaujasam involves a useless hyperbole. Of course, atitejasa qualifies dhanusha in ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 2 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... familiarly known. The art was just that in which he might naturally be expected to excel. The time-honoured couplet on Newton need not be quoted: the 'octave' on Sir Godfrey Kneller is most notable for the final bit of hyperbole: ...
— By-ways in Book-land - Short Essays on Literary Subjects • William Davenport Adams
... as the most important and those oftenest used are, Simile, Metaphor, Personification, Allegory, Synechdoche, Metonymy, Exclamation, Hyperbole, Apostrophe, Vision, Antithesis, Climax, ...
— How to Speak and Write Correctly • Joseph Devlin
... excelled 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 ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... 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 of the same mind that was in Christ, who stands ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... 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 ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 4 • Richard F. Burton
... stringency which might hint at sourness to the vulgar palate, had—so he said—destroyed for ever his contentment with any other malt liquor. He spoke of Bass and Allsopp as "palatable tonics" and "non-poisonous medicinal compounds." And when, with a flourish of hyperbole, he told Master Chuter's guests that nothing to eat or drink was to be got in London, they took his word for it; and it was without suspicion of satire that Daddy Angel said, "The gen'leman do ...
— Jan of the Windmill • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... can make the sun rise and set, morn and eve, with a pomp invariably brilliant and always new, and no one here below, if we may be permitted to use the hyperbole of Jean-Baptiste Rousseau, can play the ...
— Analytical Studies • Honore de Balzac
... 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 ...
— The Kempton-Wace Letters • Jack London
... said something as if the wickedness of the world gave me concern, he would cry out aloud against canting, and protest that he thought there was very little gross wickedness in the world, and still less of extraordinary virtue. Nothing, indeed, more surely disgusted Dr. Johnson than hyperbole; he loved not to be told of sallies of excellence, which he said were seldom valuable, and seldom true. "Heroic virtues," said he, "are the bons mots of life; they do not appear often, and when they do appear ...
— Anecdotes of the late Samuel Johnson, LL.D. - during the last twenty years of his life • Hester Lynch Piozzi
... "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 on Miss ...
— Strictly Business • O. Henry
... in these commands the language of enthusiasm of hyperbole? These maxims! are they not directly fitted to discourage, and debase a man? to degrade him in his own eyes, and those of others? to plunge him into despair? And would not the literal fulfillment of them prove destructive to society? What shall we say of that ...
— The Grounds of Christianity Examined by Comparing The New Testament with the Old • George Bethune English
... 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, ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... 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 ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... 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 of merit, without any consideration of circumstances. A keen sense of these vexatious ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... Nairne 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
... are characteristic of the boldness and vigor of the age. In his works we find the fundamental idea of the Greek drama—retributive justice. The sterner passions alone are appealed to, and the language is replete with bold metaphor and gigantic hyperbole. Venus and her inspirations are excluded; the charms of love are unknown: but the gods—vast, majestic, in shadowy outline, and in the awful sublimity of power-pass before and awe the beholder. [Footnote: see ...
— Mosaics of Grecian History • Marcius Willson and Robert Pierpont Willson
... 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 the ...
— A History of Sea Power • William Oliver Stevens and Allan Westcott
... usually peevish and irascible to her servants and children, and talking to her 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
... 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
... which it embodied were arbitrary and one-sided; but they represent a genuine endeavour to construct, if only for one class, a practicable code of conduct at a time when religion too often gloried in demanding the impossible. Chivalry degenerated into extravagance and conventional hyperbole; but at the worst it had the merit of investing human relationships and human occupations with an ideal significance. In particular it gave to women a more honourable position than they had occupied in any social system of antiquity. It rediscovered one half of human ...
— Medieval Europe • H. W. C. Davis
... 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 ...
— Odes and Carmen Saeculare of Horace • Horace
... character of Michel Ardan offered a large field for physiological analysis. This astonishing man lived in a perpetual disposition to hyperbole, and had not yet passed the age of superlatives; objects depicted themselves on the retina of his eye with exaggerated dimensions; from thence an association of gigantic ideas; he saw everything on a large scale except difficulties ...
— The Moon-Voyage • Jules Verne
... however, of 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
... 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
... Scott lay 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 ...
— The Right and Wrong Uses of the Bible • R. Heber Newton
... also abundant in that highly favored country. Iron is said to exist in every part of Spain, and to be of the best quality; while the coal mines of Asturias are described as inexhaustible. In short, nature has been so prodigal of her bounty that it has been observed with hardly an hyperbole that the Spanish nation possesses within itself nearly every natural production which can satisfy either the necessity ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VI (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland IV • Various
... Witness Dante, who is at once the most precise and homely in his reproduction of actual objects, and the most soaringly at large in his imaginative combinations. On a much lower level we distinguish the hyperbole and rapid development in descriptions of persons and events which are lit up by humorous intention in the speaker—we distinguish this charming play of intelligence which resembles musical improvisation on a given motive, where the farthest sweep of curve is looped into relevancy by an instinctive ...
— Impressions of Theophrastus Such • George Eliot
... expressions 'a town neterit 'an arm neteri,' ... is it certain 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 of ...
— Egyptian Ideas of the Future Life • E. A. Wallis Budge
... a scientific investigator to appreciate the beauties of Buitenzorg. There is here one view which has been described over and over again, oftentimes in the language of hyperbole—the view of the Tjidani Valley from the verandah of Bellevue Hotel. It is, indeed, difficult to avoid the use of extravagant language in the attempt to describe this ...
— Across the Equator - A Holiday Trip in Java • Thomas H. Reid
... spot in the Ardennes, promised to secure this desired end, let it be accepted without hesitation. For the proverbial creaking, yet long-hanging, gate—here Henrietta had the delicacy to take refuge in hyperbole—she had no liking whatever. She could not remember the time when Darby and Joan had struck her as an otherwise than preposterous couple, offspring of ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... her utmost powers to serve him; that she mourns at his misfortunes, promises him long before hand to the world; and when the world, by its sins, is unworthy to possess him longer, heaven, which calls him home, hangs out new lights, etc. With this hyperbole M. Balzac regaled Cardinal Richelieu, adding, that to form such a minister, universal nature was on the stretch; God gives him first by promise, and makes him the expectation of ages. For this he was attacked ...
— Thaumaturgia • An Oxonian
... proportions, more statuesque, and more 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 above the ordinary height. Possibly ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey, Vol. 2 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... 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 ...
— The Wild Huntress - Love in the Wilderness • Mayne Reid
... 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
... 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
... 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 ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... 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
... painter-cousin's letter, was a fitting accomplice for him, the 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
... 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
... 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 for a more general ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... indeed compelled him) that Rickman was the sort of young fool for which there is no salvation. And by the time Rickman had replied with suitable hyperbole; and Maddox, because of the great love he bore to Rickman, had observed that if Rickman chose to cut his confused throat he might do so without its being a matter of permanent regret to Maddox; and Rickman, because of the great love he bore to Maddox, had suggested his immediate departure for perdition, ...
— The Divine Fire • May Sinclair
... Prophet spoke relatively, and meant only what Samuel meant by 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 any charge concerning sacrifice; ...
— Jeremiah • George Adam Smith
... I'll 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, hate ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. IX • Various
... 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 testimony to ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... 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, as ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... 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
... 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; Isa. 38: 7, 8, ...
— Companion to the Bible • E. P. Barrows
... 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, ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... through space it is no hyperbole to compare him to a whole fleet, judiciously shown at such distance as to suppress every minute detail that could diminish ...
— Life of John Milton • Richard Garnett
... 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, through ...
— The Poetical Works of Edward Young, Volume 2 • Edward Young
... of there being a Via Media, held all along by a large party in the Anglican Church, and now at least not less than at any former time, is too subtle for his intellect. Accordingly, he thinks it was an allowable figure of speech—not more, I suppose, than an "hyperbole"—when referring to a sermon of the Vicar of St. Mary's in the magazine, to say that it was the writing of a Roman priest; and as to serious arguments to prove the point, why, they may indeed be necessary, as a ...
— Apologia pro Vita Sua • John Henry Newman
... duly 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, ...
— Irish Race in the Past and the Present • Aug. J. Thebaud
... Cawdor." No! it naturally stands much less within the prospect of belief. Here the mind of Macbeth, having long been accustomed to the nurture of its "royal hope," conceives that it is uttering a very suitable hyperbole of comparison. Had that mind been hitherto an honest mind the word "Cawdor" would have occupied the place of "king," "king" that of "Cawdor." Observe too the general character of this speech: Although the coincidence of the principal prophecy with his own ...
— The Germ - Thoughts towards Nature in Poetry, Literature and Art • Various
... That witt is past its Climactericall; And 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 ...
— The Works of Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher in Ten Volumes - Volume I. • Beaumont and Fletcher
... should read the memoirs to understand, and pause frequently to consider: how she promised her husband bravely in the beginning that she would answer for their children, and how, in what she afterwards styled the hyperbole of grief, she was called to fulfil to the letter, and was found faithful, with an unexampled strength and devotion; how she saw two children struck down by a fatal disease, and how she drew the surviving son back to health by her watchful care to send him on his college and military career with ...
— Principles of Freedom • Terence J. MacSwiney
... 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 ...
— The Pathless Trail • Arthur O. (Arthur Olney) Friel
... modern business, in some degree, is both inevitable and necessary for National and international business efficiency." Does Mr. Wilson deny this? Let him answer yes or no, directly. It is easy for a politician detected in a misstatement to take refuge in evasive rhetorical hyperbole. But Mr. Wilson is President of the United States, and as such he is bound to candid utterance on every subject of public interest which he himself has broached. If he disagrees with us, let him be frank and consistent, and recommend to ...
— Theodore Roosevelt - An Autobiography by Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt
... in our own plain English, and stripped of its poetic hyperbole, 'The very path she treads is radiant with ...
— Hortense, Makers of History Series • John S. C. Abbott
... 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
... 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
... 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 violence, and began with ...
— Persian Literature, Volume 2, Comprising The Shah Nameh, The - Rubaiyat, The Divan, and The Gulistan • Anonymous
... lay eggs with double yolks;" but this is altogether too common and natural a phenomenon to satisfy the mountaineer's conception of the power of luck; so he coolly knocks the subject flat with the audacious hyperbole, "A lucky man's horse and mare both have colts." Fortune and misfortune present themselves to the German mind as two buckets in a well; but to the Caucasian mountaineer "Fortune is like a cock's tail on a windy day" (i.e., first on ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. October, 1878. • Various
... sepulchre; they flatter with their tongue. And again: They speak with flattering lips, and with a double heart do they speak. But the Lord shall cut off all flattering lips, and the tongue that speaketh proud things. "The perpetual hyperbole" of pure love becomes in the lips of impure love the impure bait that leads the simple ones astray on the streets of the city as seen and heard by the wise man out of his casement. My son, say unto wisdom, Thou art my sister, and call understanding ...
— Bunyan Characters (Second Series) • Alexander Whyte
... without glancing at it, and walking to her guests, welcomes them with regal splendor, receiving Miss Mueller with rather obvious dignity. Mrs. Nesbit in those days was a woman of whom the doctor said, "There is no foolishness about Bedelia." The jovial Mr. Brotherton attempts some pleasant hyperbole of speech, which the hostess ignores and the Doctor greets with a smile. Mrs. Nesbit leads the way to the piano, being a woman of purpose, and whisks the eldest Miss Morton upon a stool and has the hymn book opened in less time than ...
— In the Heart of a Fool • William Allen White
... His individuality is so 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, and more general ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 118, August, 1867 • Various
... original story. The apathy and decay 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 tree, mountain and stream, ...
— Through the Malay Archipelago • Emily Richings
... The language 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 brown dwelling ...
— Vesty of the Basins • Sarah P. McLean Greene
... used him as a starting-point and source of hints.[148] Also besides pictures he has music—music not very brilliant or varied, but admirably matching his painting, soft, dreamy, not so much monotonous as uniform with a soothing uniformity. Few poets deserve better than William of Lorris the famous hyperbole which Greek furnished in turn to Latin and to English. He is indeed "softer than sleep," and, as soft sleep is, laden with ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... "Hyperbole!" But she looked down at the lichen again and began pealing it off the stone. She thought of a duke she knew. At this instant he would have been telling her that she was the most beautiful woman since Helen. What a relief this man at her side was! She was perfectly aware ...
— A Splendid Hazard • Harold MacGrath
... 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 ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. I - Essay 3: Byron • John Morley
... adventures his goods at sea, and though his hazard be great, yet if one ship return of four, he likely makes a saving voyage. An husbandman's gains are almost certain; quibus ipse Jupiter nocere non potest (whom Jove himself can't harm) ('tis [2002]Cato's hyperbole, a great husband himself); only scholars methinks are most uncertain, unrespected, subject to all casualties, and hazards. For first, not one of a many proves to be a scholar, all are not capable and docile, [2003]ex omniligno non fit Mercurius: we can make majors and officers every ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... he had just cleared 100o, and I went 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 down on mine. I seem to glimpse something ...
— My Garden Acquaintance • James Russell Lowell
... actual and to find the meaning of life in love. It 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
... finished reading the book in which you smite the detractors of R.L.S. hip and thigh. I cannot express without a sort of hyperbole the sentiments which you have awakened; of joy, of satisfaction, of relief, of malicious and vindictive pleasure. We are avenged ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... Author, would have found it very difficult to have filled [these [7]] tender Parts of the Poem with Sentiments proper for a State of Innocence; to have described the Warmth of Love, and the Professions of it, without Artifice or Hyperbole: to have made the Man speak the most endearing things, without descending from his natural Dignity, and the Woman receiving them without departing from the Modesty of her Character; in a Word, to adjust the Prerogatives of Wisdom and Beauty, and make each appear to the other in its proper Force ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... you, and with appropriate gestures, too. But, dompnedex, madame! I am past master in these specious ecstasies, for somehow I have rarely seen the woman who had not some charm or other to catch my heart with. I confess now that you alone have never quickened it. My only purpose was through hyperbole to wheedle you out of a horse, and meanwhile to have my recreation, you handsome jade!—and that is all you ever meant to me. I swear to you that is all, all, all!" sobbed Perion, for it appeared that he must die. "I have amused myself with you, ...
— Domnei • James Branch Cabell et al
... 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 managers and editorial writers was as large as that of the men who do the real work ...
— William Adolphus Turnpike • William Banks
... 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 ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... 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, of progress in the direction of organised and assured freedom, is the characteristic ...
— A Lecture on the Study of History • Lord Acton
... something exterior to every man; but to a woman her dress is part of her body. Its motions are all present to her intelligence if not to her eyes; no man knows how his coat-tails swing. By the slightest hyperbole it may be said that her dress has sensation. Crease but the very Ultima Thule of fringe or flounce, and it hurts her as much as pinching her. Delicate antennae, or feelers, bristle on every outlying frill. Go to the uppermost: ...
— Desperate Remedies • Thomas Hardy
... 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
... of men who love not fly leaves neither regard margins, but write notes over the latter, and light their pipes with the former. After seeing the wreck of a book which these persons have been busy with, one appreciates the fine Greek hyperbole. The Greeks did not speak of "thumbing" but of "walking up and down" on a volume ([Greek text]). To such fellows it matters not that they make a book dirty and greasy, cutting the pages with their fingers, and holding the boards over the fire till they crack. All these slatternly ...
— The Library • Andrew Lang
... 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
... Hyperbole.—Sprightly natures, full of fire, and whom a boundless imagination carries beyond all rules, and even what is reasonable, cannot rest satisfied ...
— Pearls of Thought • Maturin M. Ballou
... her consequent ability to refer things to their essential ideas, that in her, and her alone, resides an instrument of knowledge competent for the comprehension of truth, even the highest, which she only is able to behold face to face. It is no hyperbole that is involved in the saying, 'The pure in heart see God.' True, the man cannot see God. But the divine in man sees God. And this occurs when, by means of his soul's union with God, the man becomes 'one with the Father', and beholds God ...
— The Life Radiant • Lilian Whiting
... 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
... then mayor of New York. It had been many years since the Democrats of the metropolis had had a State executive. Edwards Pierrepont said that "no man in the convention was born when the last Democratic governor was elected from New York or Brooklyn."[1083] This, of course, was hyperbole, since Pierrepont himself could remember when, at the opening of the Erie Canal, Governor DeWitt Clinton, amidst the roar of artillery and the eloquence of many orators, passed through the locks at Albany, uniting the waters of Lake Erie with those of the Hudson. Perhaps the thought ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... 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 ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... example of the same judicious oversight we have when "in rushed Nat, under great excitement, with his eyes 'as large as saucers,' to use a hyperbole, which means only that his eyes looked very large indeed." The impression which would have been made upon the rising generation, had the testimony been allowed to go forth without its corrective, that upon a certain occasion any Governor's eyes were really as large as saucers, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various
... 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 ...
— Wolfville Days • Alfred Henry Lewis
... other interpretation but of Christ, as the Jehovah incarnate. In any other sense, it would be a specimen of more than Persian or Moghul hyperbole and bombast, of which there is no other instance in Scripture, and which no Christian would dare to attribute to an inspired writer. We know, too, that the elder Jewish Church ranked it among the Messianic Psalms. N.B. The Word in St. John, and the Name of the Most High in the Psalms, ...
— The Literary Remains Of Samuel Taylor Coleridge • Edited By Henry Nelson Coleridge
... such notorious perverters of the truth, and so often hide what little there may be in their communications under such floods of Oriental hyperbole and exaggeration, that you are often disappointed in going out on what you consider trustworthy and certain information. They often remind me of the story of the Laird of Logan. He was riding slowly ...
— Sport and Work on the Nepaul Frontier - Twelve Years Sporting Reminiscences of an Indigo Planter • James Inglis
... was up long before we returned from our ramble, and long before our host arrived. Had the Neapolitan ambassador, who told George the Third that the moon of his country was worth the sun of England, ever been in Brazil, I could almost forgive the hyperbole. The clear mild light playing on such scenery, and the cool refreshing breeze of evening, after a day of all but intolerable heat, render the night indeed the season of pleasure in this climate: nor were the rude songs of the negroes, as they loaded the boats to be ...
— Journal of a Voyage to Brazil - And Residence There During Part of the Years 1821, 1822, 1823 • Maria Graham
... 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: no ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... 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
... of fish in trees. Even the Chinese would. "To climb a tree in pursuit of fish," is a phrase actually used as an hyperbole of nonsense by many Tsze, in the book called "Shang Mung." And the above is therefore a fair instance of the progress of human intelligence,—of a thousand years of incredulity, and final scientific admission. Let it be taken here ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 93, July, 1865 • Various
... 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 after a discipline of thirteen years; of ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Letters and Journals, Vol. 1 • Lord Byron, Edited by Rowland E. Prothero
... poetical genius of the Greeks, these have 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 ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... adopt the language of hyperbole, in which all these people seem to indulge, you can tell him that a row is surely good, and warms the cockles of the heart, and that so far as I am concerned I'm his boy. My only stipulation is that he allows me to ...
— King Solomon's Mines • H. Rider Haggard
... author could account for the measure of popularity his plays have attained. It would rather indicate that the German public was ready for open discussion of the problems involved and that Wedekind's frankness and honesty, his lapses into diabolical grimace and grotesque hyperbole notwithstanding, met a demand of his time. Nor did he restrict himself to that one particular problem. His irony spared no institution, no person: lese-majeste was one of his offenses; nor did he spare himself. Born into a generation ...
— The German Classics, v. 20 - Masterpieces of German Literature • Various
... 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 ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... and in a province not larger than Rhode Island there are a hundred such towns. According to Mr. Porter, the language of Scripture, which the strongest powers of deglutition have sometimes rejected as that of Eastern hyperbole, is literally verified at every step in the land of Bashan. The facts, he says, would not stand the arithmetic of Bishop Colenso for an instant; yet from the summit of the castle of Salcah (capital of his late gigantic Majesty, King Og) he counted thirty utterly deserted and perfectly ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 105, July 1866 • Various
... God of the 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
... looked more beautiful than she did at this instant. We ought not, therefore, to condemn the maid of the inn for her hyperbole, who, when she descended, after having lighted the fire, declared, and ratified it with an oath, that if ever there was an angel upon earth, she ...
— The History of Tom Jones, a foundling • Henry Fielding
... 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 ...
— Guns of the Gods • Talbot Mundy
... only a story, 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 mud ...
— Dotty Dimple Out West • Sophie May
... a letter in the Literary Gazette of 13th November, 1858, which I was obliged to write to defend a questioned expression respecting Turner's subtlety of hand from a charge of hyperbole, contains some interesting and conclusive evidence on the point, though it refers to pencil and chalk ...
— The Two Paths • John Ruskin
... dale; poetical exaggeration or hyperbole, implying that fragrant flowers became even more fragrant ...
— Milton's Comus • John Milton |
