Make a Mountain Out of a Molehill

The core idea of blowing something tiny wildly out of proportion goes back to the Greek satirist Lucian, in the 2nd century AD, though his original version compared an elephant to a fly rather than a mountain to a molehill. The Dutch scholar Erasmus included the same idea in his influential collection of classical proverbs, Adagia (1500-1536), and when the English cleric Nicholas Udall translated Erasmus's work in 1548, he's credited with introducing the specific mountain-and-molehill imagery English still uses today: "The Sophistes of Grece coulde through their copiousness make an Elephant of a flye, and a mountaine of a molehill."