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Quotes About Artificiality

One could make almost anything happen, if one tried hard enough, but the trying - it seemed to me – was almost always a sign that one was crossing the currents, was forcing events in a direction that they did not naturally want to go, and though you might argue that nothing could ever be accomplished without going against nature to some extent, the artificiality of that vision and its consequences had become – to put it bluntly - anathema to me.
~ Rachel Cusk
I am not a part of this home any longer. I am a tiny thing created by indifferent scientists. I am an experiment, a mechanical bee placed near the hive. The real bees were happy being bees until I came along and gave them all the false information that destroyed their little lives.
~ James Tate
Speech is human nature itself, with none of the artificiality of written language.
~ Alfred North Whitehead
Our thermosed lives are, at best nine-tenths of the time padded by vacuum and sealed by silvered silicon, but, for all their artificiality, we are generally able to find means for unstoppering them now and then, and enjoy at least some portion of addlepated freedom.
~ Ken Kesey
Speech is human nature itself, with none of the artificiality of written language.
~ Alfred North Whitehead
All attempts to create something admirable are the weapons of evil. You may think you are practising benevolence and righteousness, but in effect you will be creating a kind of artificiality. Where a model exists, copies will be made of it; where success has been gained, boasting follows; where debate exists, there will be outbreaks of hostility.
~ Zhuangzi
It is not uncommon in the modern world for people to retreat into the world of books to escape from the realities of the outside world. The printed word evokes the modern notion of security, with the emphasis on detachment, privacy, autonomy, predictability, and enclosed artificiality.
~ Jeremy Rifkin
Insulated from natural contacts with earth, air and sunlight, by corsets pressing on the solar plexus, by voluminous petticoats, cotton stockings and kid boots, the drowsy well-fed girls lounging in the shade were no more a part of their environment than figures in a photograph album, arbitrarily posed against a backcloth of cork rocks and cardboard trees.
~ Joan Lindsay
Artificiality is the best way to enjoy what's natural. Whatever I've enjoyed in these vast fields I've enjoyed because I don't live here. One who has never lived under constraints doesn't know what freedom is.
~ Fernando Pessoa
La artificialidad es la manera de disfrutar la naturalidad. Lo que he disfrutado de estos campos vastos, lo he disfrutado porque no vivo aquí. No siente la libertad quien nunca se ha visto oprimido.
~ Fernando Pessoa
I admire Vegas's purity, its entirely wholesome artificiality.
~ Colson Whitehead
There is the glamour side of it, which allows you to meet great variety of people with whom you simply can have a good time, but there's also the sad side of it that drags you into a superficial and artificial world.
~ Karolina Kurkova
I'm sure it was real but it resembled one of those cheap wigs worn by department-store mannequins, jet black and as glossy as nylon. It didn't seem to belong to her head.
~ Anthony Horowitz
Characters in a novel or a play who act all the way through exactly as one expects them to... This consistency of theirs, which is held up to our admiration, is on the contrary the very thing which makes us recognise that they are artificially composed.
~ Andre Gide
How Rhythm Beautifies.- Rhythm casts a veil over reality; it causes various artificiality's of speech and obscurities of thought; by the shadow it throws upon thought it sometimes conceals it, and sometimes brings it into prominence. As shadow is necessary to beauty, so the "dull" is necessary to lucidity. Art makes the aspect of life endurable by throwing over it the veil of obscure thought.
~ Friedrich Nietzsche
Hollywood is tied hand and foot to the demands for artificiality of the masses all over the world.
~ Lionel Barrymore
Even moving around onstage seemed very artificial. But at the same time you have to make that effort in order to get back to who you are and even accept not moving, if that's who you are.
~ Charlotte Gainsbourg
betrayed by certain artificialities of conduct, thrust from a great mechanical world upon this bare plateau of existence that fronted the wilderness.
~ John Williams
He was always acting, always enveloping himself in artificiality, perhaps to conceal the volcano within.
~ Barbara W. Tuchman
Nothing hinders a thing from being natural so much as the straining ourselves to make it seem so.
~ Francois de La Rochefoucauld
Dear, dear, it only shows that there is nothing diviner about a king than there is about a tramp, after all. He is just a cheap and hollow artificiality when you don't know he is a king. But reveal his quality, and dear me it takes your very breath away to look at him. I reckon we are all fools. Born so, no doubt.
~ Mark Twain
Artificiality and work have steadily increased since its inception and are known as culture: in domesticating animals and plants man necessarily domesticated himself.
~ John Zerzan
Today we come across an individual who behaves like an automaton, who does not know or understand himself, and the only person that he knows is the person that he is supposed to be, whose meaningless chatter has replaced communicative speech, whose synthetic smile has replaced genuine laughter, and whose sense of dull despair has taken the place of genuine pain.
~ Stephen R. Covey
Thus his penchant for artificiality and his love of eccentricity could surely be explained as the results of sophistical studies, super-terrestrial subtleties, semi-theological speculations; fundamentally, they were ardent aspirations towards an ideal, towards an unknown universe, towards a distant beatitude, as utterly desirable as that promised by the Scriptures.
~ Joris-Karl Huysmans