Artificial Quotes - Page 14

• On the evenings when my parents held parties, the drawing-room mirrors multiplied to infinity the scintillations of a crystal chandelier. Mama would take her seat at the grand piano to accompany a lady dressed in a cloud of tulle who played the violin and a cousin who performed on a cello. I would crack between my teeth the candied shell of an artificial fruit, and a burst of light would illuminate my palate with a taste of blackcurrant or pineapple: all the colours, all the lights were mine, the gauzy scarves, the diamonds, the laces; I held the whole party in my mouth.

  Simone de Beauvoir

  Cousin, Party, Clouds

  Simone de Beauvoir (2016). “Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter”, p.7, HarperCollins

  46 Copy quote

  Show source

• Perhaps we are on an insula ex machina, an artificial place not in the real world at all -- a backdrop for the stories we must tell.

  Kate Atkinson

  Real, Stories, World

  Kate Atkinson (2013). “Emotionally Weird: A Novel”, p.97, Macmillan

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Very much indeed of what we call moral education is such an artificial modification and perversion of instinct; pugnacity is trained into courageous self-sacrifice, and suppressed sexuality into religious emotion.

  H. G. Wells

  Religious, Sacrifice, Self

  H. G. Wells (2016). “H. G. WELLS Ultimate Collection: 120+ Science Fiction Classics, Novels & Stories; Including Scientific, Political and Historical Works: The Time Machine, The Island of Doctor Moreau, The Invisible Man, The War of the Worlds, Modern Utopia, A Short History of the World, What Is Coming, The Story of the Last Trump…”, p.2683, e-artnow

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• Age is artificial. It's soulless. It doesn't matter one bit.

  Laurie Faria Stolarz

  Age, Matter, Soulless

  7 Copy quote

• Your criticism sounds to me as if you have read too many critical books and are too smart in an artificial, destructive, and very limited way.

  Flannery O'Connor

  Smart, Book, Criticism

  Flannery O'Connor (1988). “The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor”, p.407, Macmillan

  16 Copy quote

  Show source

• As man advances in civilization, and small tribes are united into larger communities, the simplest reason would tell each individual that he ought to extend his social instincts and sympathies to all members of the same nation, though personally unknown to him. This point being once reached, there is only an artificial barrier to prevent his sympathies extending to the men of all nations and races.

  Charles Darwin

  Men, Race, Civilization

  Charles Darwin (2016). “The Descent of Man: the Evolution”, p.114, VM eBooks

  31 Copy quote

  Show source

• Artificial intelligence is growing up fast, as are robots whose facial expressions can elicit empathy and make your mirror neurons quiver.

  Diane Ackerman

  Growing Up, Mirrors, Expression

  "The growing, feeling house of the future" by Diane Ackerman, archive.thedailystar.net. August 25, 2012.

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• Conceptions are artificial. Perceptions are essential.

  Wallace Stevens

  Perception, Essentials, Conception

  Wallace Stevens (2011). “Opus Posthumous: Poems, Plays, Prose”, p.246, Vintage

  12 Copy quote

  Show source

• Good sense tells us that earthly things are rare and fleeting, and that true reality exists only in dreams. To draw sustenance from happiness- natural or artificial - you must first have the courage to swallow it; and those who perhaps most merit happiness are precisely those on whom felicity, as mortals conceive it, always acts as a vomitive.

  Charles Baudelaire

  Dream, Reality, Fleeting

  Charles Baudelaire (1996). “Artificial Paradises”, Citadel Press

  5 Copy quote

  Show source

• Yes, I laugh at all mankind, and the imposition that they dare to practice when they talk of hearts. I laugh at human passions and human cares, vice and virtue, religion and impiety; they are all the result of petty localities, and artificial situation. One physical want, one severe and abrupt lesson from the colorless and shriveled lip of necessity, is worth all the logic of the empty wretches who have presumed to prate it, from Zeno down to Burgersdicius. It silences in a second all the feeble sophistry of conventional life, and ascetical passion.

  Charles Robert Maturin

  Passion, Heart, Practice

  19 Copy quote

• I'd been blindsided with the most painful knowledge: the first man to ever say he loved me had never loved me at all. His passion had been artificial. His pursuit of me had been choreographed.

  Charlaine Harris

  Passion, Men, Firsts

  Charlaine Harris (2009). “Sookie Stackhouse 8-copy Boxed Set”, p.1433, Penguin

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• The pain was as unexpected as a thunderclap in a clear sky. Eddis's chest tightened, as something closed around her heart. A deep breath might have calmed her, but she couldn't draw one. She wondered if she was ill, and she even thought briefly that she might have been poisoned. She felt Attolia reach out and take her hand. To the court it was unexceptional, hardly noticed, but to Eddis it was an anchor, and she held on to it as if to a lifeline. Sounis was looking at her with concern. Her responding smile was artificial.

  Megan Whalen Turner

  Pain, Heart, Hands

  4 Copy quote

• But when one believes in the reality of things, making them visible by artificial means is not quite the same as feeling that they are close at hand.

  Marcel Proust

  Believe, Mean, Reality

  Marcel Proust (2000). “In Search of Lost Time, Volume II: Within a Budding Grove (A Modern Library E-Book)”, p.31, Modern Library

  5 Copy quote

  Show source

• A physical shortcoming could produce a kind of mental excess. The process, it seemed, was reversible. Mental excess could produce, for its own purposes, the voluntary blindness and deafness of deliberate solitude, the artificial impotence of asceticism.

  Aldous Huxley

  Solitude, Purpose, Excess

  Peter Edgerly Firchow, Aldous Huxley (1984). “The end of Utopia: a study of Aldous Huxley's Brave new world”, Bucknell Univ Pr

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• Merely external emancipation has made of the modern woman an artificial being. Now, woman is confronted with the necessity of emancipating herself from emancipation, if she really desires to be free.

  Emma Goldman

  Feminism, Being Free, Desire

  Emma Goldman, Candace Falk, Barry Pateman, Jessica M. Moran (2004). “Emma Goldman: Making speech free, 1902-1909”, p.180, Univ of California Press

  34 Copy quote

  Show source

• The dominance of short-term perspectives has led to routine decisions in the markets that sacrifice the long-term buildup of genuine value in pursuit of artificial, short-term gains.

  Al Gore

  Sacrifice, Long, Perspective

  Interview with John McMurtrie, www.sfgate.com. February 17, 2013.

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Maybe we are all prospective migrants. The lines of national borders on maps are artificial constructs, as unnatural to us as they are to birds flying overhead. Our first impulse is to ignore them.

  Mohsin Hamid

  Bird, Flying, Firsts

  "Now that I've finally been admitted to Britain it seems that everyone else suddenly wants to leave" by Mohsin Hamid, www.theguardian.com. August 5, 2008.

  9 Copy quote

  Show source

• It is because the body is a machine that education is possible. Education is the formation of habits, a superinducing of an artificial organization upon the natural organization of the body.

  Thomas Huxley

  Education, Organization, Body

  Thomas Henry Huxley (2012). “Lay Sermons, Addresses and Reviews”, p.403, tredition

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• In truth, politeness is artificial good humor, it covers the natural want of it, and ends by rendering habitual a substitute nearly equivalent to the real virtue.

  Thomas Jefferson

  Real, Humor, Want

  Thomas Jefferson (1977). “The Portable Thomas Jefferson”, p.407, Penguin

  19 Copy quote

  Show source

• Some people worry that artificial intelligence will make us feel inferior, but then, anybody in his right mind should have an inferiority complex every time he looks at a flower.

  Alan Kay

  Nature, Flower, Should Have

  69 Copy quote

• The best way to begin genuine bipartisanship to make America stronger is to work together on the real crises facing our country, not to manufacture an artificial crisis to serve a special interest agenda out of touch with the needs of Americans.

  John F. Kerry

  Country, Real, America

  66 Copy quote

• The planned sit-down reception is an artificial forum where one is presented with a limited number of persons with whom he can hold a conversation.

  Jerzy Kosinski

  Numbers, Literature, Forums

  16 Copy quote

• To do well those thing which God ordained to be the common lot of all man-kind, is the truest greatness. To be a successful father or a successful mother is greater than to be a successful general or a successful statesman... We should never be discouraged in those daily tasks which God has ordained to the common lot of man... Let us not be trying to substitute an artificial life for the true one.

  Joseph Fielding Smith

  Mother, Father, Successful

  7 Copy quote

• Government control gives rise to fraud, suppression of Truth, intensification of the black market and artificial scarcity. Above all, it unmans the people and deprives them of initiative, it undoes the teaching of self-help.

  Mahatma Gandhi

  Teaching, Government, Self

  "Delhi Diary". Book by Mahatma Gandhi, pp. 68-70, March 1948.

  82 Copy quote

  Show source

• The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again since it is life.

  William Faulkner

  Life, Art, Moving

  1956 Interview in Paris Review, Spring.

  59 Copy quote

  Show source