Artifice Quotes - Page 2

• 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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• I don't see myself in terms of artifice. I see myself as a real person who chooses to live my life in an open way - artistically.

  Lady Gaga

  Real, Way, Living My Life

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• I don't have stylistic loyalty. That's why people perceive me changing all the time. But there is a real continuity in my subject matter. As an artist of artifice, I do believe I have more integrity than any one of my contemporaries.

  David Bowie

  Loyalty, Integrity, Real

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• Stripping away artifice - it's the constant standard I aim for in acting, to approximate life. People talk about being bigger than life - but there's nothing bigger than life.

  Robert Duvall

  People, Acting, Bigger Than Life

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• Good writing is deceptive in that it hides its own artifice - it makes it seem easy.

  Michael Arndt

  Writing, Easy, Deceptive

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• Language leads a double life - and so does the novelist. You chat with family and friends, you attend to your correspondence, you consult menus and shopping lists, you observe road signs, and so on. Then you enter your study, where language exists in quite another form - as the stuff of patterned artifice.

  Martin Amis

  Shopping, Family And Friends, Novelists

  Martin Amis (2017). “The Rub of Time: Bellow, Nabokov, Hitchens, Travolta, Trump. Essays and Reportage, 1986-2016”, p.16, Random House

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• I definitely dislike pomposity and artifice. I hope that I'm not that. Once I write a song, it belongs to the world, and the way people perceive it, it's cool.

  Daryl Hall

  Song, Writing, People

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• Nature is mighty. Art is mighty. Artifice is weak. For nature is the work of a mightier power than man. Art is the work of man under the guidance and inspiration of a mightier power. Artifice is the work of mere man, in the imbecility of his mimic understanding.

  Augustus William Hare

  Art, Inspiration, Men

  Julius Charles HARE (Archdeacon of Lewes. and HARE (Augustus William)), Augustus William HARE (1847). “Guesses at Truth, by Two Brothers. Third edition. First Series”, p.280

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• Films are artifice. We're telling stories on film. At the same time, when it works, there is a real tough immediacy and spontaneity to it, and a punch.

  Paul McGann

  Real, Telling Stories, Tough

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• Being blond is definitely a different state of mind. I can't really put my finger on it, but the artifice of being blond has some incredible sort of sexual connotation.

  Madonna Ciccone

  Mind, Different, Incredibles

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• We call for the three great stimulants of the exhausted ones, artifice, brutality, and innocence.

  Joni Mitchell

  Alcohol, Drug, Brutality

  Song: The Three Great Stimulants, Album: Dog Eat Dog

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• By the word simplicity, is not always meant folly or ignorance; but often, pure and upright Nature, free from artifice, craft or deceitful ornament.

  Benjamin Franklin

  Ignorance, Simplicity, Ornaments

  Benjamin Franklin (2004). “Poor Richard's Almanack”, p.261, Barnes & Noble Publishing

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• There is no artifice as good and desirable as simplicity.

  Saint Francis de Sales

  Writing, Editing, Simplicity

  Saint Francis de Sales, Aeterna Press (2015). “The Spiritual Maxims of Saint Francis de Sales”, Aeterna Press

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• There's this idea that it's all natural, but everything's been staged to look natural. It is also an invention. It's just that my inventions are different. I often get asked about my artifice, but isn't fashion based on the idea that we can create a fantasy?

  Lady Gaga

  Fashion, Ideas, Different

  "The Real Lady Gaga". Interview with Laura Brown, www.harpersbazaar.com. September 6, 2011.

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• Among the numerous requisites that must concur to complete an author, few are of more importance than an early entrance into the living world. The seed of knowledge may be planted in solitude, but must be cultivated in public. Argumentation may be taught in colleges, and theories formed in retirement; but the artifice of embellishment and the powers of attraction can be gained only by a general converse.

  Samuel Johnson

  Retirement, Writing, College

  Samuel Johnson (1977). “Selected Poetry and Prose”, p.215, Univ of California Press

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• Life is very nice, but it has no shape. The object of art is actually to give it some and to do it by every artifice possible-truer than the truth.

  Jean Anouilh

  Art, Nice, Giving

  'La Rèpètition' (The Rehearsal, 1950) act 2

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• He was still too young to know that the heart's memory eliminates the bad and magnifies the good, and that thanks to this artifice we manage to endure the burden of the past.

  Gabriel Garcia Marquez

  Inspiring, Memories, Heart

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• Experiment is the sole interpreter of the artifices of Nature.

  Leonardo da Vinci

  Sole, Experiments, Interpreter

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• Cold exactitude is not art; ingenious artifice, when it pleases or when it expresses, is art itself.

  Eugene Delacroix

  Art, Cold, Exactitude

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• It makes you a different person, to not have a past. It eats away at who you are, until what’s left is all construct, all artifice.

  Holly Black

  Past, Different, Constructs

  Holly Black (2012). “Black Heart”, p.81, Simon and Schuster

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• And since gin to artifice bears the same relation as tears to mascara, her attractions at once dissembled.

  Truman Capote

  Tears, Bears, Mascara

  Truman Capote (2012). “Breakfast at Tiffany's”, p.46, Vintage

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• Protoplasm, simple or nucleated, is the formal basis of all life. It is the clay of the potter: which, bake it and paint it as hewill, remains clay, separated by artifice, and not by nature from the commonest brick or sun-dried clod.

  Thomas Huxley

  Simple, Bricks, Clay

  Thomas Henry Huxley (2008). “A Scientific Education”, p.99, Lulu.com

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• I am commonly opposed to those who modestly assume the rank of champions of liberty, and make a very patriotic noise about the people. It is the stale artifice which has duped the world a thousand times, and yet, though detected, it is still successful. I love liberty as well as anybody. I am proud of it, as the true title of our people to distinction above others; but . . . I would guard it by making the laws strong enough to protect it.

  Fisher Ames

  Strong, Patriotic, Successful

  Fisher Ames, John Thornton Kirkland (1969). “Works of Fisher Ames: Memoir, by J. T. Kirkland. Letters”

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• The younger and healthier a woman is and the more her new and glossy body seems destined for eternal freshness, the less useful is artifice; but the carnal weakness of this prey that man takes and its ominous deterioration always have to be hidden from him...In any case, the more traits and proportions of a woman seem contrived, the more she delighted the heart of man because she seemed to escape the metamorphosis of natural things. The result is this strange paradox that by desiring to grasp nature, but transfigured, in woman, man destines her to artifice.

  Simone de Beauvoir

  Heart, Men, Weakness

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• There is something so far-fetched and so extravagant in the idea of danger to liberty from the militia that one is at a loss whether to treat it with gravity or with raillery; whether to consider it as a mere trial of skill, like the paradoxes of rhetoricians; as a disingenuous artifice to instil prejudices at any price; or as the serious.

  Alexander Hamilton

  Loss, Skills, Ideas

  Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, John Jay (2014). “The Federalist Papers”, p.135, Courier Corporation

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