Some folks never exaggerate - they just remember big.
~Attributed to both Audrey Snead and Chi Chi Rodriguez

An exaggeration is a truth that has lost its temper.
~Kahlil Gibran

Nothing makes a fish bigger than almost being caught.
~Author Unknown

If you add to the truth, you subtract from it.
~The Talmud

Exaggeration is to paint a snake and add legs.
~Proverb

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

Man is inclined to exaggerate almost everything - except his own mistakes.
~Author Unknown

To exaggerate is to weaken.
~Jean François de La Harpe, Melanie, 1770

Exaggeration is a blood relation to falsehood and nearly as blamable.
~Hosea Ballou

By speaking, by thinking, we undertake to clarify things, and that forces us to exacerbate them, dislocate them, schematize them. Every concept is in itself an exaggeration.
~Jose Ortega y Gasset

All news is an exaggeration of life.
~Daniel Schorr

All passions exaggerate; and they are passions only because they do exaggerate.
~Nicolas Chamfort

There is no one who does not exaggerate. In conversation, men are encumbered with personality, and talk too much.
~Ralph Waldo Emerson

False eloquence is exaggeration; true eloquence is emphasis.
~William Alger

Never exaggerate your faults, your friends will attend to that.
~Bob Edwards

'Tis a rule of manners to avoid exaggeration.
~Ralph Waldo Emerson

Exaggeration misleads the credulous and offends the perceptive.
~Eliza Cook

There's no disappointment in memory, and one's exaggerations are always on the good side.
~George Eliot

What makes us discontented with our condition is the absurdly exaggerated idea we have of the happiness of others.
~French Proverb

We exaggerate misfortune and happiness alike. We are never as bad off or as happy as we say we are.
~Honore de Balzac

Some so speak in exaggerations and superlatives that we need to make a large discount from their statements before we can come at their real meaning.
~Tryon Edwards

We overstate the ills of life, and takeImagination... down our earth to rake...
~Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Alcohol is perfectly consistent in its effects upon man. Drunkenness is merely an exaggeration. A foolish man drunk becomes maudlin; a bloody man, vicious; a coarse man, vulgar.
~Willa Sibert Cather

Every vice is only an exaggeration of a necessary and virtuous function.
~Ralph Waldo Emerson

Exaggeration is in the course of things. Nature sends no creature, no man into the world, without adding a small excess of his proper quality. Given the planet, it is still necessary to add the impulse; so, to every creature nature added a little violence of direction in its proper path, a shove to put it on its way; in every instance, a slight generosity, a drop too much.
~Ralph Waldo Emerson

All cartoon characters and fables must be exaggeration, caricatures. It is the very nature of fantasy and fable.
~Walt Disney

To a small man every greater is an exaggeration.
~Henry David Thoreau

It is human to exaggerate the merits of the dead.
~Mark Twain

Exaggeration, the inseparable companion of greatness.
~Voltaire

We aim above the mark, to hit the mark. Every act hath some falsehood of exaggeration in it.
~Ralph Waldo Emerson

How many may a man of diffusive conversation count among his acquaintances, whose lives have been signalized by numberless escapes; who never cross the river but in a storm, or take a journey into the country without more adventures than befel the knights-errant of ancient times in pathless forests or enchanted castles! How many must he know, to whom portents and prodigies are of daily occurrence; and for whom nature is hourly working wonders invisible to every other eye, only to supply them with subjects of conversation?
~Samuel Johnson