Hyperbole

A deliberate exaggeration, which no one takes literally, to give emphasis to a feeling or a situation.

In Paradise

now who are you, who want to sit in the chair to judge from a thousand miles away with the short sight of a span?

"A thousand miles" of distance against "a span" of sight: the contrast of magnitudes is deliberately disproportionate. The exaggeration gives body to the idea that the human eye is too small to measure God's justice.

Cantos XVII to XX: The prophecy and the Eagle, The Eagle, to Dante, responding to the doubt about the man of the Indus

Florence does not have as many Lapi and Bindi as the fables that are shouted each year from the pulpit, here and there: so that the little sheep, who do not know, return from the pasture full of wind, and they are not excused for not seeing the harm

Cantos XXIX to XXXIII: The Empyrean, Beatrice, to Dante, about the preachers