"I am not given to exaggeration, and..." - Quote by Mark Twain
I am not given to exaggeration, and when I say a thing I mean it.
More by Mark Twain
“So you see, the quality of humor is not a personal or a national monopoly. It's as free as salvation, and, I am afraid, far more widely distributed. But it has its value, I think. The hard and sordid things of life are too hard and too sordid and too cruel for us to know and touch them year after year without some mitigating influence, some kindly veil to draw over them, from time to time, to blur the craggy outlines, and make the thorns less sharp and the cruelties less malignant.”
“The man who sets out to carry a cat by its tail learns something that will always be useful and which never will grow dim or doubtful.”
“Life does not consist mainly - or even largely - of facts and happenings.”
More on Honesty
“The liar is no whit better than the thief, and if his mendacity takes the form of slander he may be worse than most thieves. It puts a premium upon knavery untruthfully to attack an honest man, or even with hysterical exaggeration to assail a bad man with untruth.”
“I couldn't be two faced. If I had two faces, I wouldn't wear this one.”
“Men do not like to admit to even momentary imperfection. My husband forgot the code to turn off the alarm. When the police came, he wouldn't admit he'd forgotten the code... he turned himself in.”
More on Truth
“There is not a truth existing which I fear... or would wish unknown to the whole world.”
“Undoubtedly we have no questions to ask which are unanswerable. We must trust the perfection of the creation so far, as to believe that whatever curiosity the order of things has awakened in our minds, the order of things can satisfy. Every man's condition is a solution in hieroglyphic to those inquiries he would put. He acts it as life, before he apprehends it as truth.”
“To the living we owe respect, but to the dead we owe only the truth.”