Artifice Quotes

• Art' is the same word as 'artifice,' that is to say, something deceitful. It must succeed in giving the impression of nature by false means.

  Edgar Degas

  Art, Mean, Giving

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• I adore artifice. I always have.

  Diana Vreeland

  Fashion, Adore

  Diana Vreeland (1997). “D.V.”

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• The sad thing about artificial intelligence is that it lacks artifice and therefore intelligence.

  Jean Baudrillard

  Funny, Humor, Computer

  Jean Baudrillard (1990). “Cool memories”, Verso

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• The Stolen and Perverted Writings of Homer & Ovid, of Plato & Cicero, which all men ought to contemn, are set up by artifice against the Sublime of the Bible

  William Blake

  Plato, Writing, Men

  William Blake, W. H. Stevenson (2007). “Blake: The Complete Poems”, p.501, Pearson Education

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• Such is the common process of marriage. A youth and maiden exchange meeting by chance, or brought together by artifice, exchange glances, reciprocate civilities, go home, and dream of one another. Having little to divert attention, or diversify thought, they find themselves uneasy when they are apart, and therefore conclude that they shall be happy together. They marry, and discover what nothing but voluntary blindness had before concealed; they wear out life in altercations, and charge nature with cruelty.

  Samuel Johnson

  Marriage, Dream, Home

  Samuel Johnson, Peter Martin (2009). “Samuel Johnson: Selected Writings”, p.310, Harvard University Press

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• We all wear some disguise, make some professions, use some artifice, to set ourselves off as being better than we are; and yet it is not denied that we have some good intentions and praiseworthy qualities at bottom.

  William Hazlitt

  Quality, Use, Good Intentions

  William Hazlitt (1839). “Sketches and Essays”, p.29

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• Art lies by its own artifice.

  Ovid

  Art, Lying, Deception

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• Art, whose honesty must work through artifice, cannot avoid cheating truth.

  Adrienne Rich

  Cheating, Art, Honesty

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• I always like to reveal the fact that the emperor has no clothes. And children are best at that. They teach us how to see the world in that sense. They are without artifice; they see it for what it is. I am drawn to that ruthless honesty.

  Mira Nair

  Children, Honesty, Clothes

  Interview with Bonnie Greer, www.theguardian.com. June 12, 2002.

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• The heart's memory eliminates the bad and magnifies the good.

  Gabriel Garcia Marquez

  Memories, Heart, Literature

  Gabriel Garcia Marquez (2014). “Gabriel Garcia Marquez Ebook Library”, p.1365, Penguin UK

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• I've never understood people who play up the artifice of music.

  Carrie Brownstein

  Play, People, Understood

  "Stumptown Girl" by Margaret Talbot, www.newyorker.com. January 2, 2012.

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• Humility is often merely feigned submissiveness assumed in order to subject others, an artifice of pride which stoops to conquer, and although pride has a thousand ways of transforming itself it is never so well disguised and able to take people in as when masquerading as humility.

  Francois de La Rochefoucauld

  Humility, Pride, Order

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• Art is for [the Irish] inseparable from artifice: of that, the theatre is the home. Possibly, it was England made me a novelist.

  Elizabeth Bowen

  Art, Home, Theatre

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• Consume my heart away, sick with desire And fastened to a dying animal It knows not what it is, and gather me Into the artifice of eternity.

  William Butler Yeats

  Heart, Animal, Sick

  "Sailing to Byzantium" l. 21 (1928)

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• The intuitive connection children feel with animals can be a tremendous source of joy. The unconditional love received from pets, and the lack of artifice in the relationship, contrast sharply with the much trickier dealings with members of their own species.

  Frans de Waal

  Children, Unconditional Love, Animal

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• I felt from time to time that shooting live music is the most purely cinematic thing you can do. Ideally, the cinema is becoming one with the music. There is little artifice involved. There's no acting. I love it.

  Jonathan Demme

  Becoming One, Acting, Cinema

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• Holidays are in no sense an alternative to the congestion and bustle of the cities and work. Quite the contrary. People look to escape into an intensification of the conditions of ordinary life, into a deliberate aggravation of those conditions: further from nature, nearer to artifice, to abstraction, to total pollution, to well above average levels of stress, pressure, concentration and monotony - this is the ideal of popular entertainment. No one is interested in overcoming alienation; the point is to plunge into it to the point of ecstasy. That is what holidays are for.

  Jean Baudrillard

  Stress, Holiday, Vacation

  "Cool Memories".

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• To regard the imagination as metaphysics is to think of it as part of life, and to think of it as part of life is to realize the extent of artifice. We live in the mind.

  Wallace Stevens

  Life, Thinking, Imagination

  Wallace Stevens (1997). “Collected Poetry and Prose”

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• If some hole does not possess striking individuality through some gift of nature, it must be given as much as possible artificially, and the artifice must be introduced in so subtle a manner as to make it seem natural.

  A. W. Tillinghast

  Golf, Individuality, Doe

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• Well, all rock and roll is based in artifice.

  Billy Corgan

  Rocks, Rock And Roll, Wells

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• All possible means were used by the infatuated parents to conclude the bargain; and deception put an end to these usual artifices.

  Adelbert von Chamisso

  Mean, Hype, Parent

  Theodor Storm, Adelbert von Chamisso, Adalbert Stifter (2005). “Famous German Novellas of the 19th Century”, p.52, Mondial

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• I don't flatter myself with much dependence upon the present disposition of the Eastern Indians, who are many ways liable to be drawn into a rupture with us by the artifices of the French, their own weakness and the influence which the French Missionary Priests have over them.

  William Shirley

  Way, Weakness, Missionary

  William Shirley, National Society of the Colonial Dames of America (1973). “Correspondence of William Shirley, Governor of Massachusetts and military commander in America, 1731-1760”

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• History is representational, while time is abstract; both of these artifices may be found in museums, where they span everybody's own vacancy

  Robert Smithson

  Museums, Vacancy, May

  Robert Smithson, Jack D. Flam (1996). “Robert Smithson, the Collected Writings”, p.41, Univ of California Press

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• That sense of a life in natural objects, which in most poetry is but a rhetorical artifice, was, then, in Wordsworth the assertion of what was for him almost literal fact.

  Walter Pater

  Facts, Wordsworth, Natural

  Walter Pater (1901). “The Works of Walter Pater: Essays from 'The Guardian.'”

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• If we bestow but a very little attention to the economy of the animal creation, we shall find manifest examples of premeditation, perseverance, resolution, and consumate artifice, in order to effect their purpose.

  William Bartram

  Perseverance, Animal, Order

  William Bartram (1958). “The Travels of William Bartram”, p.57, University of Georgia Press

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