Quotes About Artifice

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.

Conceit is to nature what paint is to beauty; it is not only needless, but it impairs what it would improve.

Technology is lust removed from nature.

Man maketh a death which Nature never made.

I have thought some of Nature's journeymen had made men and not made them well, they imitated humanity so abominably.

Dissimulation, even the most innocent in its nature, is ever productive of embarrassment; whether the design is evil or not artifice is always dangerous and almost inevitably disgraceful.

The truest poetry is the most feigning.

The mimicry of passion is the most intolerable of all poses.

My artificial creations will be better than nature's natural creations.

Come then, ye generous citizens, range yourselves under the standard of General Liberty, against which all the force and artifice of tyranny will never be able to prevail. General

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.

Edie enters the Factory in her otherworldly daze. She is at once natural and a creation of pure artifice. Everything about her - her tights, her long legs, her high heels, her preternaturally skinny body, her huge eyes - seems to drift upwards as if the cigarette she is smoking were made of helium.

I have heard of your paintings too, well enough; God has given you one face, and you make yourselves another.

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

Say, it's only a paper moon, / Sailing over a cardboard sea.

fiction is both artifice and verisimilitude, and that there is nothing difficult in holding together these two possibilities.

I hate fake people. You know what I'm talking about. Mannequins.

Why could one never do a natural thing without having to screen it behind a structure of artifice?

Posing is death. I think when you make people pose for a photograph, you kill them.

Charm is a way of getting the answer yes without asking a clear question.

There Affectation, with a sickly mien, Shows in her cheek the roses of eighteen

Relationships have become like pizza and coke, which might look fancy but has nothing good to offer.

L.A. is conventional to a hyper-real degree. It's plastic.

The bad poet is a toady mimicking nature.