#artifice

A mode of thought does not become 'critical' simply by attributing that label to itself, but by virtue of its content. ↗

— Alan Sokal

#critical-thinking #science #skepticism #science

When one is young, one venerates and despises without that art of nuances which constitutes the best gain of life, and it is only fair that one has to pay dearly for having assaulted men and things in this manner with Yes and No. Everything is arranged so that the worst of tastes, the taste for the unconditional, should be cruelly fooled and abused until a man learns to put a little art into his feelings and rather to risk trying even what is artificial — as the real artists of life do. ↗

— Friedrich Nietzsche

#judgment #maturity #nuance #unconditional #youth

In the end, this volume should be read a s a collection of love stories, Above all, they are tales of love, not the love with which so many stories end – the love of fidelity, kindness and fertility – but the other side of love, its cruelty, sterility and duplicity. In a way, the decadents did accept Nordau's idea of the artist as monster. But in nature, the glory and panacea of romanticism, they found nothing. Theirs is an aesthetic that disavows the natural and with it the body. The truly beautiful body is dead, because it is empty. Decadent work is always morbid, but its attraction to death is through art. What they refused was the condemnation of that monster. And yet despite the decadent celebration of artifice, these stories record art's failure in the struggle against natural horror. Nature fights back and wins, and decadent writing remains a remarkable account of that failure. ↗

— Asti Hustvedt

#artifice #dead #death #decadence #decadent

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

#artifices #both #everybody #found #history

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

#am #artifice #best #children #clothes

I've never understood people who play up the artifice of music. ↗

— Carrie Brownstein

#i #music #never #people #play

All possible means were used by the infatuated parents to conclude the bargain; and deception put an end to these usual artifices. ↗

— Adelbert von Chamisso

#bargain #conclude #deception #end #infatuated

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

#artifice #assertion #fact #him #life

To regard the imagination as metaphysics is to think of it as part of life, and to think of it as part of life is to realize the extent of artifice. We live in the mind. ↗

— Wallace Stevens

#extent #imagination #life #live #metaphysics

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. ↗

— William Bartram

#animal #artifice #attention #bestow #creation