Artificiality Quotes

• Trials and tribulations tend to squeeze the artificiality out of us, leaving the essence of what we really are and clarifying what we really yearn for.

  Neal A. Maxwell

  Essence, Leaving, Trials

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• Speech is human nature itself, with none of the artificiality of written language.

  Alfred North Whitehead

  Speech, Language, Human Nature

  Alfred North Whitehead (1968). “Modes of Thought”, p.37, Simon and Schuster

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• Hollywood is tied hand and foot to the demands for artificiality of the masses all over the world.

  Lionel Barrymore

  Hands, Feet, Hollywood

  Biography/Personal Quotes, www.imdb.com.

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• I know from experience that to one who thinks much and feels deeply, it often seems that he has only to put down his thoughts and feelings in order to produce something altogether out of the common; yet as soon as he sets to work he falls into a certain mannerism of style and common phraseology; his thoughts do not come spontaneously, and one might almost say that it is not the mind that directs the pen, but the pen leads the mind into common, empty artificiality.

  Henryk Sienkiewicz

  Fall, Thinking, Order

  Henryk Sienkiewicz (1897). “Without Dogma: A Novel of Modern Poland”

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• The convention missionaries call "modesty" has no standard, and cannot have one, because it is opposed to nature and reason and is therefore an artificiality and subject to anybody's whim - anybody's diseased caprice.

  Mark Twain

  Modesty, Reason, Conventions

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• A cynic might suggest as the motto of modern life this simple legend-"just as good as the real.

  Charles Dudley Warner

  Real, Simple, Legends

  Charles Dudley Warner (1872). “Back-log studies and My summer in a garden”, p.3

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• I wish more and more that health were studied half as much as disease is. Why, with all the endowment of research against cancer, is no study made of those who are free from cancer? Why not inquire what foods they eat, what habits of body and mind they cultivate?

  Sarah Norcliffe Cleghorn

  Cancer, Health, Animal

  "Threescore: The Autobiography of Sarah N. Cleghorn".

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• As one who was never terribly enamored of Hillary Clinton's personality to start with, I grudgingly admit to enjoying her recent near-tears transformation. Plenty of critics concede her rarely seen emotion was heartfelt, but also that it was due to the 20-hour-day rigors of the campaign trail, making her perhaps the only candidate ever to win the New Hampshire primary because she needed a nap. Still, it was refreshing to watch her punch through the icy crust of her own phoniness, so that the molten core of artificiality could gush forth.

  Matt Labash

  Winning, Naps, Personality

  "Making Political Trouble". www.weeklystandard.com. January 28, 2008.

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• There is no such thing as beauty. If your culture says, 'This is a beautiful girl,' that's within the framework of your culture. If you're brought up in an island where people have pointed heads, that would be 'beautiful' in your terms. All these mythological structures is what gets us into trouble; the artificiality of our values that get us into trouble.

  Jacque Fresco

  Beautiful, Girl, Islands

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• Every style seems completely appropriate to its epoch. We cannot imagine Madame de Pompadour, or the Empress Josephine, or the early Victorian lady in anything but the clothes she actually wore. Each represents completely the ideals of her time: elegant artificiality or post-Revolutionary morals, or the prudery of the rising middle class.

  James Laver

  Fashion, Class, Clothes

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• In horror stories or in fairy tales, the fascination with the morbid is also, at least for me, a way to prepare for the unthinkable… That’s why it’s very important for me to show the artificiality of it all, because the real horrors of the world are unmatchable, and they’re too profound.  It’s much easier to absorb – to be entertained by it, but also to let it affect you psychologically – if it’s done in a fake, humorous, artificial way.

  Cindy Sherman

  Real, Humorous, Horror Stories

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• In my view the plangent artificiality of a lot of creative work results from the fact that the people who write novels, direct films and put on plays tend to read too many novels, watch too many films and go to too many plays.

  Will Self

  Writing, Views, Play

  "It's a wild, Wilde world" by Will Self, www.theguardian.com. July 4, 2003.

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• If I were of the trade, I should naturalize art as much as they "artialize" nature.

  Michel de Montaigne

  Art, Nature, Should

  Michel de Montaigne (1946). “The essays”

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• Adam and Eve entered the world naked and unashamed - naked and pure-minded. And no descendant of theirs has ever entered it otherwise. All have entered it naked, unashamed, and clean in mind. They entered it modest. They had to acquire immodesty in the soiled mind, there was no other way to get it. ... The convention mis-called "modesty" has no standard, and cannot have one, because it is opposed to nature and reason and is therefore an artificiality and subject to anyone's whim - anyone's diseased caprice.

  Mark Twain

  Mind, Naked, World

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• All that the world most needs today, is combined in the most seductive manner in his art, — the three great stimulants of exhausted people: brutality, artificiality and innocence (idiocy).

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Art, People, Brutality

  "Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche".

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• However much we may feel for the misery of someone close to us, we always act with some artificiality in their presence. We hold-back from telling them everything we think, often because we do not genuinely mean what we say; or because we take a pleasure in their plight, thankful that we are not affected.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Mean, Thinking, Plight

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• Unless our laboratory results are to give us artificialities, mere scientific curiosities, they must be subjected to interpretation by gradual re-approximation to conditions of life.

  John Dewey

  Science, Giving, Curiosity

  John Dewey, Jo Ann Boydston, Joe R. Burnett (2008). “The Middle Works, 1899-1924: 1899-1901”, p.145, SIU Press

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• I want to keep developing. I want to become relaxed in my own work and go deeper. Just growing and studying and trying new things and hopefully having professional access to work that's good and interesting. I don't want to be on the treadmill of artificiality.

  Gale Harold

  Interesting, Trying, Growing

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• It's too much show business and too much prompting, too much artificiality, and not really debates. They're rehearsed appearances.

  George H. W. Bush

  Democracy, Too Much, Debate

  Interview with Jim Lehrer, www.pbs.org. April 10, 1999.

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• Use the longest leader you can handle. Usually you can handle one much longer than you imagine. Remember that the purpose of the leader is to conceal artificiality. If you believe a leader is at all necessary then you must admit that the longer the leader the better chances you have for success

  Ray Bergman

  Believe, Sea, Fishing

  Ray Bergman (2000). “Trout”, p.360, Derrydale Press

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• Artificiality is one curse that will drop away the moment we kneel at Jesus' feet and surrender ourselves to His meekness. Then we will not care what people think of us so long as God is pleased. Then what we are will be everything; what we appear will take its place far down the scale of interest for us. Apart from sin we have nothing of which to be ashamed. Only an evil desire to shine makes us want to appear other than we are.

  Aiden Wilson Tozer

  Jesus, Thinking, Feet

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• There are hidden contradictions in the minds of people who "love Nature" while deploring the "artificialities" with which "Man has spoiled Nature.'" The obvious contradiction lies in their choice of words, which imply that Man and his artifacts are not part of "Nature" : but beavers and their dams are.

  Robert A. Heinlein

  Funny, Lying, Animal

  Time Enough for Love "Intermission" (1973)

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• The garden reconciles human art and wild nature, hard work and deep pleasure, spiritual practice and the material world. It is a magical place because it is not divided. The many divisions and polarizations that terrorize a disenchanted world find peaceful accord among mossy rock walls, rough stone paths, and trimmed bushes. Maybe a garden sometimes seems fragile, for all its earth and labor, because it achieves such an extraordinary delicate balance of nature and human life, naturalness and artificiality. It has its own liminality, its point of balance between great extremes.

  Thomas Moore

  Life, Spiritual, Art

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• I usually see the word "metafiction" applied to works that draw attention to their own devices, their own artificiality, in order to mock novelistic convention and show the impossibility of capturing a reality external to the text or whatever.

  Ben Lerner

  Reality, Order, Attention

  Source: www.believermag.com

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• Life creeps slowly upward.... When some forgotten inventor of the older world smote his rival or enemy with a branch of wood and found that it was good and thereafter made a practice of smiting rivals and enemies with branches of wood, then, and on that day, artificiality may be said to have begun. Then, and on that day, was begun a revolution destined to change the history of life. Then, and on that day, was laid the cornerstone of that most tremendous of artifices, CIVILIZATION!

  Jack London

  Practice, Civilization, Enemy

  Jack London (2014). “The Kempton-Wase Letters”, p.75, Simon and Schuster

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