Error's monstrous shapes from earth are driven
They fade, they fly - but truth survives the flight. [ Bryant ]
I have heard they are the most lewd impostors,
Made of all terms and shreds, no less beliers
Of great men's favours than their own vile medicines,
Which they will utter upon monstrous oaths;
Selling that drug for two pence ere they part.
Which they have valued at twelve crowns before. [ Ben Jonson ]
Every one fault seeming monstrous till his fellow-fault came to match it. [ Shakespeare ]
The youth of the present day are quite monstrous. They have absolutely no respect for dyed hair. [ Oscar Wilde, Lady Windemere's Fan ]
Ingratitude is monstrous; and for the multitude to be ingrateful were to make a monster of the multitude. [ William Shakespeare ]
It is perfectly monstrous the way people go about nowadays saying things against one, behind one's back, that are absolutely and entirely true. [ Oscar Wilde, A Woman of No Importance ]
It seems strange that a butterfly's wing should be woven up so thin and gauzy in the monstrous loom of nature, and be so delicately tipped with fire from such a gross hand, and rainbowed all over in such a storm of thunderous elements. The marvel is that such great forces do such nice work. [ Theodore Parker ]
What caricature is in painting, burlesque is in writing; and in the same manner the comic writer and painter correlate to each other; as in the former, the painter seems to have the advantage, so it is in the latter infinitely on the side of the writer. For the monstrous is much easier to paint than describe, and the ridiculous to describe than paint. [ Fielding ]
The most influential books, and the truest in their influence, are works of fiction. They repeat, they re-arrange, they clarify the lessons of life; they disengage us from ourselves, they constrain us to the acquaintance of others; and they show us the web of experience, but with a singular change - that monstrous, consuming ego of ours being, nonce, struck out. [ Robert Louis Stevenson ]
Calumny is a monstrous vice: for, where parties indulge in it, there are always two that are actively engaged in doing wrong, and one who is subject to injury. The calumniator inflicts wrong by slandering the absent; he who gives credit to the calumny before he has investigated the truth is equally implicated. The person traduced is doubly injured - first by him who propagates, and secondly by him who credits the calumny. [ Heroidotus ]