Top 136 Artifice Quotes & Sayings

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.

We may employ artifice to deceive a rival, anything against our enemies.

Well, all rock and roll is based in artifice.

Fiction accesses a certain kind of truth through artifice. I love to create worlds that operate on their own terms.

We call for the three great stimulants of the exhausted ones, artifice, brutality, and innocence.

Obviously VIA DOLOROSA is completely artificial. It is as highly wrought as any of my plays. But basically all the artifice is to disguise itself so you don't feel it's there. You're attempting to make the artifice like a pane of glass that simply leads you through to the subject - not to decorate the bloody glass.

Films are artifice. We're telling stories on film. At the same time, when it works, there is a real tough immediacy and spontaneity to it, and a punch.

Not to discover weakness is The Artifice of strength.

The power of the voice in rap is about the expression of truth, rather than the expression of some kind of artifice.

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.

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.

Art lies by its own artifice.

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.

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.

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.

Modesty is the artifice of actors, similar to passion in call girls.

Cold exactitude is not art; ingenious artifice, when it pleases or when it expresses, is art itself.

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

I think that artifice is the new reality. It's more about just being honest and sincere to the core of what you do. Whether I'm wearing lots of makeup or no makeup, I'm always the same person inside.

Art is an artifice that you try to make seem natural.

I'm becoming more of a novelist as I get older. The novel just seems the truer form. There's less artifice involved.

I don't see myself in terms of artifice. I see myself as a real person who chooses to live my life in an open way - artistically.

There is no artifice as good and desirable as simplicity.

The younger and healthier a woman is and the more her new and glossy body seems destined for eternal freshness, the less useful is artifice; but the carnal weakness of this prey that man takes and its ominous deterioration always have to be hidden from him...In any case, the more traits and proportions of a woman seem contrived, the more she delighted the heart of man because she seemed to escape the metamorphosis of natural things. The result is this strange paradox that by desiring to grasp nature, but transfigured, in woman, man destines her to artifice.

I adore artifice. I always have.

If you scratch through the deceitful artifice of contemporary photography, you'll find the real artifice underneath.

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.

I always try to just be honest ... As opposed to artifice or manipulation.

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

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.

Isn't it better to triumph by the strength of your muscles than by the artifice of a derailleur?

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.

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

[John Calvin] writes clearly, directly, without artifice, and gets straight to the practical heart of the matter.

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

[Ed Lauter] was an actor's actor. I love working with that class of actor. You know, they come in, they do it, no bullshit. There's no artifice, there's no fanciness, they're just honest and tough and direct.

I definitely dislike pomposity and artifice. I hope that I'm not that. Once I write a song, it belongs to the world, and the way people perceive it, it's cool.

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.

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.

By the word simplicity, is not always meant folly or ignorance; but often, pure and upright Nature, free from artifice, craft or deceitful ornament.

We are shallow because our media are so horribly shallow. Every morning, I peruse the papers, and there is so little to read in them. It is the same with radio - all that noise, that artifice.

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

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.

I realized early on that artifice attracted me to an image more than any other quality - I mean artifice in the sense of staging and heightened color and exaggerated lighting, not a surreal or fictive moment... I think the lighting and feeling of Cinemascope, the movies I saw as a kid, always stayed with me as a kind of glorious vision of reality.

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.

Artifice is art.

And since gin to artifice bears the same relation as tears to mascara, her attractions at once dissembled.

I love glamour and artificial beauty. I love the idea of artifice and dressing up and makeup and hair.

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.

Wisdom consists partly in not pretending anymore, in discarding artifice.

There's a manner of speaking you use while lawyering. A manner as affected and rife with artifice as your average campaign speech, with a similar fear of offending.

He was still too young to know that the heart's memory eliminates the bad and magnifies the good, and that thanks to this artifice we manage to endure the burden of the past.

Ponder and deliberate before you make your move. He will conquer who has learned the artifice of deviation. Such is the art of maneuvering.

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

All art is a form of artifice.For in art there can be no prejudices.

For me and my drag, I think camp is about exaggeration and artifice and the celebration of superficiality. A lot of my fans look up to me as a figure of femininity but that's all artifice. That's all fake and that's campy within itself, and so that's what resonates to me: the seriousness and the funniness and the artifice and the exaggeration.

One wants to see the artifice of the thing as well as the subject.

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.

Good writing is deceptive in that it hides its own artifice - it makes it seem easy.

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.