#artifice

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

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

#acting #aim #approximate #artifice #away

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

There's a difference between playing and playing games. The former is an act of joy, the latter — an act. ↗

— Vera Nazarian

#acting #artifice #falsehood #game #games

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

Poetry, even when apparently most fantastic, is always a revolt against artifice, a revolt, in a sense, against actuality. ↗

— James Joyce

#against #always #apparently #artifice #even

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

Art, whose honesty must work through artifice, cannot avoid cheating truth. ↗

— Adrienne Rich

#artifice #avoid #cannot #cheating #honesty

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

— Carrie Brownstein

#i #music #never #people #play