Top 100 Quotes About Artifice

#1. There is no artifice as good and desirable as simplicity.

Francis De Sales

Quotes About Artifice #31943
#2. Simeon Potter notes that when James II first saw St. Paul's Cathedral he called it amusing, awful, and artificial, and meant that it was pleasing to look at, deserving of awe, and full of skillful artifice.

Bill Bryson

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#3. What is given by nature is not necessarily good, what is achieved by artifice is not necessarily worthless.

John Armstrong

Quotes About Artifice #52038
#4. She saw, yet again, that her friend's compliments were just bits of art and artifice. They were paper swans, cunningly folded so that they could float on the air for a few moments. Nothing more.

Marie Rutkoski

Quotes About Artifice #115203
#5. We know all about you, Rincewind the magician. You are a man of great cunning and artifice. You laugh in the face of Death. Your affected air of craven cowardice does not fool me.
It fooled Rincewind.

Terry Pratchett

Quotes About Artifice #119871
#6. I think I would rather just live my life," Teddy said, "not make an artifice of it.

Kate Atkinson

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#7. True beauty is to be found in natural forms. The more we magnify, and the closer we examine, the works of Artifice, the grosser and stupider they seem. But if we magnify the natural world it only becomes more intricate and excellent.

Neal Stephenson

Quotes About Artifice #125438
#8. 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

Quotes About Artifice #127400
#9. What! Would you make no distinction between hypocrisy and devotion? Would you give them the same names, and respect the mask as you do the face? Would you equate artifice and sincerity? Confound appearance with truth? Regard the phantom as the very person? Value counterfeit as cash?

Moliere

Quotes About Artifice #139801
#10. We blow the past a kiss, our last blush of artifice as performers before this Future we're flirting with becomes terribly and totally Real. And we then begin to occupy reality.

Woody Evans

Quotes About Artifice #157605
#11. I've always been interested in the form itself, so I always feel like I've never been good at going ahead with the artifice and not acknowledging the self in the artistic process, and not acknowledging the absurdity of pretending that's required in fiction.

Dave Eggers

Quotes About Artifice #162719
#12. know a Work of Art from a Daub of Artifice)

Thomas Carlyle

Quotes About Artifice #209806
#13. Cold exactitude is not art; ingenious artifice, when it pleases or when it expresses, is art itself.

Eugene Delacroix

Quotes About Artifice #216060
#14. We have constructed an artifice, a Potemkin village of an ecosystem where we perpetrate the illusion that the things we consume have just fallen off the back of Santa's sleigh, not been ripped from the earth. The illusion enables us to imagine that the only choices we have are between brands.

Robin Wall Kimmerer

Quotes About Artifice #218775
#15. I felt from time to time that shooting live music is the most purely cinematic thing you can do. Ideally, the cinema is becoming one with the music. There is little artifice involved. There's no acting. I love it.

Jonathan Demme

Quotes About Artifice #238282
#16. Not to discover weakness is The Artifice of strength.

Emily Dickinson

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#17. When a portion of wealth passes out of the hands of him who has acquired it, without his consent, and without compensation, to him who has not created it, whether by force or by artifice, I say that property is violated, that plunder is perpetrated.

Frederic Bastiat

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#18. The theater, for all its artifices, depicts life in a sense more truly than history.

George Santayana

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#19. Above the keyhole the door has a latch. It is pretending to be an authentic old latch. The door is pretending to be an authentic old door. Maybe everything there is isn't authentic any more. Maybe everything there is is a kind of pretending.

Ali Smith

Quotes About Artifice #259261
#20. 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

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#21. Art isn't life, you know. It if were, the world would go up in flames. It's artifice. By definition.
("Talking In The Dark")

Dennis Etchison

Quotes About Artifice #290800
#22. The girl in the mirror caught my eye briefly ... It is an uncanny feeling, that rare occasion when one catches a glimpse of oneself in repose. An unguarded moment, stripped of artifice, when one forgets to fool even oneself.

Kate Morton

Quotes About Artifice #300393
#23. With living creatures / one must begin very early / to dwarf their growth : / the bound feet, / the crippled brain, / the hair curlers, / the hands you / love to touch.

Marge Piercy

Quotes About Artifice #303720
#24. And the podcasting - I swear to you - on its worst day, the podcasts are better than our best films. Because they're more imaginative, and there's no artifice, and it's far more real.

Kevin Smith

Quotes About Artifice #319956
#25. Nothing has been left undone by the enemies of freedom. Every art and artifice, every cruelty and outrage has been practiced and perpetrated to destroy the rights of man. In this great struggle, every crime has been rewarded and every virtue has been punished.

Robert Green Ingersoll

Quotes About Artifice #331186
#26. The power of the voice in rap is about the expression of truth, rather than the expression of some kind of artifice.

Eliza Griswold

Quotes About Artifice #335149
#27. The stain of place hangs on not as a birthright but as a sort of artifice, a bit of cosmetic.

Elizabeth Hardwick

Quotes About Artifice #335365
#28. If you scratch through the deceitful artifice of contemporary photography, you'll find the real artifice underneath.

Douglas McCulloh

Quotes About Artifice #338873
#29. Representative government is artifice, a political myth, designed to conceal from the masses the dominance of a self-selected, self-perpetuating, and self-serving traditional ruling class.

Giuseppe Prezzolini

Quotes About Artifice #351140
#30. In the '50s, audiences accepted a level of artifice that the audiences in 1966 would chuckle at. And the audiences of 1978 would chuckle at what the audience of 1966 said was okay, too. The trick is to try to be way ahead of that curve, so they're not chuckling at your movies 20 years down the line.

Quentin Tarantino

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#31. The sad thing about artificial intelligence is that it lacks artifice and therefore intelligence.

Jean Baudrillard

Quotes About Artifice #360959
#32. I've never understood people who play up the artifice of music.

Carrie Brownstein

Quotes About Artifice #372000
#33. If some hole does not possess striking individuality through some gift of nature, it must be given as much as possible artificially, and the artifice must be introduced in so subtle a manner as to make it seem natural.

A. W. Tillinghast

Quotes About Artifice #379008
#34. 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.

Edgar Degas

Quotes About Artifice #383559
#35. Time had the power to cancel all changes wrought by human artifice, overwriting all new revisions with further revisions, returning the flow to its original course

Haruki Murakami

Quotes About Artifice #396151
#36. The sightseers would have been disappointed, as the real thing always makes a poorer show than the fake. ("I'm Dangerous Tonight")

Cornell Woolrich

Quotes About Artifice #406335
#37. Art, whose honesty must work through artifice, cannot avoid cheating truth.

Adrienne Rich

Quotes About Artifice #406434
#38. That sense of a life in natural objects, which in most poetry is but a rhetorical artifice, was, then, in Wordsworth the assertion of what was for him almost literal fact.

Walter Pater

Quotes About Artifice #424501
#39. Isn't it better to triumph by the strength of your muscles than by the artifice of a derailleur?

Henri Desgrange

Quotes About Artifice #429425
#40. We all wear some disguise, make some professions, use some artifice, to set ourselves off as being better than we are; and yet it is not denied that we have some good intentions and praiseworthy qualities at bottom.

William Hazlitt

Quotes About Artifice #499207
#41. I always like to reveal the fact that the emperor has no clothes. And children are best at that. They teach us how to see the world in that sense. They are without artifice; they see it for what it is. I am drawn to that ruthless honesty.

Mira Nair

Quotes About Artifice #510507
#42. He was bookish, she was not; he was theoretical, she political. She called a rose a rose. He called it an accumulation of cultural and biological constructions circulating around the mutually attracting binary poles of nature/artifice.

Zadie Smith

Quotes About Artifice #516234
#43. Don't make the mistake of believing it's enough to reproduce the realities of life ... The object of art is to give life a shape, and to do it by every conceivable artifice.

Jean Anouilh

Quotes About Artifice #538207
#44. All art is a form of artifice.For in art there can be no prejudices.

Arthur Symons

Quotes About Artifice #543536
#45. One wants to see the artifice of the thing as well as the subject.

Richard Diebenkorn

Quotes About Artifice #596594
#46. Maybe illusion and artifice - lies, even - are a necessary part of romance.

Jody Gehrman

Quotes About Artifice #625707
#47. O cruel cloudless space,
And pale bare ground where the poor infant lies!
Why do we feel restored
As in a sacramental place?
Here Mystery is artifice,
And here a vision of such peace is stored,
Healing flows from it through our eyes.

May Sarton

Quotes About Artifice #626639
#48. We're giving up free range, getting organized, feathering our emotions. Efficiency an effectiveness and all those other pieces of intellectual artifice. And with the loss of free range, the cowboy disappears, along with the mountain lion and gray wolf. There's not much room left for travelers.

Robert James Waller

Quotes About Artifice #632779
#49. And since gin to artifice bears the same relation as tears to mascara, her attractions at once dissembled.

Truman Capote

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#50. You can tell within a sentence if something is fiction or non-fiction. You can tell in the artifice of the language or the care of the construction the difference between art and life.

Ethan Canin

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#51. 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

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#52. So you might say, 'Why do you end up making theatre in a world in which there is already too much of that? Creating layer upon layer of artifice?' Perhaps the function is to pierce through that cloud and show reality - so the function of art is to make things - to show: 'Hang on, this is real.'

Simon McBurney

Quotes About Artifice #770061
#53. Look in the heart and write ... The man who writes like that, without pride or artifice, as it were for himself, is in reality speaking for humanity. Humanity will recognize itself in him, because it is human nature that has inspired the discourse. Life recognizes life!

Antonin Sertillanges

Quotes About Artifice #800643
#54. I want to be seen here in my simple, natural, ordinary fashion, without straining or artifice; for it is myself that I portray ... I am myself the matter of my book.

Michel De Montaigne

Quotes About Artifice #817615
#55. All too often, we mask truth in artifice, concealing ourselves for fear of losing the ones we love or prolonging a deception for those we wish to expose. We hide behind that which brings us comfort from pain and sadness or use it to repel a truth too devastating to accept.

Emily Thorne

Quotes About Artifice #836705
#56. Good writing is deceptive in that it hides its own artifice - it makes it seem easy.

Michael Arndt

Quotes About Artifice #838720
#57. I know precisely what honor is, Heracles. Honor is the artifice kings sell the peasants' sons so that they may fight and die without pay. Honor is what drives a peaceful man to bloody vengeance. Honor is what drove the Celts to behead the children of the Apache Courts.
- The Egyptian God Bes

Jonathan Maas

Quotes About Artifice #860658
#58. I still feel that variable gears are only for people over forty-five. Isn't it better to triumph by the strength of your muscles than by the artifice of a derailleur? We are getting soft ... As for me, give me a fixed gear!

Henri Desgrange

Quotes About Artifice #890857
#59. 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

Quotes About Artifice #896772
#60. We perceive no charms that are not sharpened, puffed out, and inflated by artifice. Those which glide along naturally and simply easily escape a sight so gross as ours.

Michel De Montaigne

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#61. Always run to the short way; and the short way is the natural: accordingly say and do everything in conformity with the soundest reason. For such a purpose frees a man from trouble, and warfare, and all artifice and ostentatious display.

Marcus Aurelius

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#62. It is the destiny of things real to destroy those that are artifice.

Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

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#63. A piece of art, when completed, encapsulates its own reality. As its architect, the artist's task is to craft it well enough that the reader believes in its existence and is willing to enter, explore, and engage based on the artist's version of the truth, even if that truth is artifice.

Kate Kearns

Quotes About Artifice #915452
#64. I am so delighted when I get to see a really good movie. In that experience the artifice of movie making, the photography or the cutting style, falls away because you are inside the movie.

Jay Cassidy

Quotes About Artifice #936124
#65. Customary use of artifice is the sign of a small mind, and it almost always happens that he who uses it to cover one spot uncovers himself in another.

Francois De La Rochefoucauld

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#66. 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

Quotes About Artifice #960446
#67. And I wanted this girl who was like no girl I had ever known, wanted her not in spite of her moods and her secret bruises and her sad attempts at artifice but because of them, because of them all.

Tana French

Quotes About Artifice #982696
#68. The Stolen and Perverted Writings of Homer & Ovid, of Plato & Cicero, which all men ought to contemn, are set up by artifice against the Sublime of the Bible

William Blake

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#69. If a family is an expression of continuity through biology, a city is an expression of continuity through will amd imagination - through mental choices making artifice, not through physical reproduction.

A. Bartlett Giamatti

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#70. 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

Quotes About Artifice #1108932
#71. Modesty is the artifice of actors, similar to passion in call girls.

Jackie Gleason

Quotes About Artifice #1120979
#72. The intuitive connection children feel with animals can be a tremendous source of joy. The unconditional love received from pets, and the lack of artifice in the relationship, contrast sharply with the much trickier dealings with members of their own species.

Frans De Waal

Quotes About Artifice #1132628
#73. I did plays in college, and I have half of a play. But I'm kind of stuck. I keep revisiting it so maybe it will move somewhere. There's something about plays where you can feel that sense of artifice at any moment.

Aimee Bender

Quotes About Artifice #1143626
#74. Perhaps jungle life, despite physical danger, was a relaxing one. Surely it was free of the petty grievances, the disparate values of society. It was simple, devoid of artifice and ulcer-burning pressures.

Richard Matheson

Quotes About Artifice #1167219
#75. Humility is often merely feigned submissiveness assumed in order to subject others, an artifice of pride which stoops to conquer, and although pride has a thousand ways of transforming itself it is never so well disguised and able to take people in as when masquerading as humility.

Francois De La Rochefoucauld

Quotes About Artifice #1170584
#76. 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.

Jean De La Bruyere

Quotes About Artifice #1178438
#77. Art lies by its own artifice.

Ovid

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#78. The outfit, tight in places,
and loose in some, says as much
in the buttons as it does in cuffs.

Kristen Henderson

Quotes About Artifice #1236144
#79. Art is for [the Irish] inseparable from artifice: of that, the theatre is the home. Possibly, it was England made me a novelist.

Elizabeth Bowen

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#80. Natural beauty is always tiresome. It lacks that careless touch of artifice that is the hallmark of true originality. There is nothing so overdone and vulgar as unspoilt simplicity.

Emily Croy Barker

Quotes About Artifice #1251821
#81. We call for the three great stimulants of the exhausted ones, artifice, brutality, and innocence.

Joni Mitchell

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#82. I have this prodigious talent for painting the person behind the facade, but with Blaine the facade is all there is left - just artifice, guile, and an expensive pair of silicone tits.

Tabitha McGowan

Quotes About Artifice #1262033
#83. I love glamour and artificial beauty. I love the idea of artifice and dressing up and makeup and hair.

Dita Von Teese

Quotes About Artifice #1270421
#84. If conversation be an art, like painting, sculpture, and literature, it owes its most power charm to nature; and the least shade of formality or artifice destroys the effect of the best collection of words.

Henry Theodore Tuckerman

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#85. I think when you look at architectural photography it doesn't help to have piles of old clothes lying on the floor. Architectural photography sets up an artifice.

Annabelle Selldorf

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#86. How did you know I needed you?" Fern whispered in broken tones.
"Because I needed you," Ambrose confessed without artifice, his voice thick with heartache.

Amy Harmon

Quotes About Artifice #1331635
#87. This, reader, is an honest book ... I want to appear in my simple, natural and everyday dress, without strain or artifice; for it is myself that I portray

Michel De Montaigne

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#88. Philosophy is a will to confront human artifice with its outside, with Nature.

Maurice Merleau Ponty

Quotes About Artifice #1378567
#89. A mode of thought does not become 'critical' simply by attributing that label to itself, but by virtue of its content.

Alan Sokal

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#90. 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

Quotes About Artifice #1423434
#91. Everything you do is so personal. In the end, it doesn't matter so much if you write about your own life or not. It's going to be as much artifice when it comes out as a piece of music. Everything is in character in a way. But that's a great thing.

Jenny Hval

Quotes About Artifice #1457857
#92. There's a difference between playing and playing games. The former is an act of joy, the latter - an act.

Vera Nazarian

Quotes About Artifice #1468694
#93. I always try to just be honest ... As opposed to artifice or manipulation.

Demetri Martin

Quotes About Artifice #1469616
#94. Let's go old school to impress people. Wear a smile, rather than a branded dress. Crease out our differences with understanding. And, use empathy, care, and patience as accessories. Then, let's make a conversation, not talk.
Ah, what a fine world it would be! Fine, pure and minus artifice.

Saru Singhal

Quotes About Artifice #1472433
#95. You know how someone - something - surprises you. You wake up a little bit. That's done through Chinese cuisine - for example, through dishes of artifice. That's a whole sub-tradition in Chinese cuisine. To create a dish that comes to the table looking like one thing but actually is something else.

Nicole Mones

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#96. I adore artifice. I always have.

Diana Vreeland

Quotes About Artifice #1483009
#97. Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is; and gather me
Into the artifice of eternity.

W.B.Yeats

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#98. 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

Quotes About Artifice #1501363
#99. 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

Quotes About Artifice #1508291
#100. Well, all rock and roll is based in artifice.

Billy Corgan

Quotes About Artifice #1546262

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