Делать из мухи слона (Delat' iz mukhi slona)

Literally: To make an elephant out of a fly

Example: “Это всего лишь царапина, не делай из мухи слона.” — It's only a scratch; don't make a mountain out of a molehill.

English equivalent: To make a mountain out of a molehill

Origin: Traces to classical antiquity: the Greek satirist Lucian, writing in the 2nd century AD, used almost the identical line in his mock-serious essay "In Praise of the Fly," writing that he would cut his praise short "so that no one thinks that I, as the saying goes, am making an elephant out of a fly." Lucian's own phrasing — "as the saying goes" — makes clear the expression was already an established, recognizable proverb to his readers well before he used it himself, meaning its true origin reaches back earlier still. The same basic comparison appears independently across many European languages today, built on the same simple visual contrast: a fly, among the smallest creatures anyone routinely encounters, transformed rhetorically into an elephant, among the largest — a deliberately absurd leap in scale used to describe wildly overblown exaggeration.