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Artificiality Quotes

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Artificiality Quotes

“A utopian system, when established by men, is likely to be synonymous with a dystopian depression. The only way for perfect peace by man is absolute control of all wrongs. Bully-cultures find this: with each and every mistake, another village idiot is shamed into nothingness and mindlessly shut down by the herd. This is a superficial peace made by force and by fear, one in which there is no freedom to breathe; and the reason it is impossible for man to maintain freedom and peace for everyone at the same time. Christ, on the other hand, transforms, instead of controls, by instilling his certain inner peace. This is the place where one realizes that only his holiness is and feels like true freedom, rather than like imprisonment, and, too, why Hell, I imagine, a magnified version of man's never-ending conflict between freedom and peace, would be the flesh's ultimate utopia - yet its ultimate regret.”

WarPhilosophyGodRealityGovernmentPoliticalCultureForceHeavenFearPeaceChristFreedomSinHellGraceSocietyRegretBattleConflictDepressionForgivenessDevilMercyTransformationSalvationUnityChaosInner PeaceTyrannyTheologyConfusionOppressionVanityManSatanHolinessControlEstablishmentDictatorshipBullyUtopiaGood IntentionsDystopiaImprisonmentPolice StateApologeticsSuperficialityHerd MentalityArtificialityTotalitarian
Book:Healology
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“The source of love, as I learned later, is a curiosity which, combined with the inclination which nature is obliged to give us in order to preserve itself. […] Hence women make no mistake in taking such pains over their person and their clothing, for it is only by these that they can arouse a curiosity to read them in those whom nature at their birth declared worthy of something better than blindness. […] As time goes on a man who has loved many women, all of them beautiful, reaches the point of feeling curious about ugly women if they are new to him. He sees a painted woman. The paint is obvious to him, but it does not put him off. His passion, which has become a vice, is ready with the fraudulent title page. ‘It is quite possible,’ he tells himself, ‘that the book is not as bad as all that; indeed, it may have no need of this absurd artifice.’ He decides to scan it, he tries to turn over the pages—but no! the living book objects; it insists on being read properly, and the ‘egnomaniac’ becomes a victim of coquetry, the monstrous persecutor of all men who ply the trade of love. You, Sir, who are a man of intelligence and have read these least twenty lines, which Apollo drew from my pen, permit me to tell you that if they fail to disillusion you, you are lost—that is, you will be the victim of the fair sex to the last moment of your life. If that prospect pleases you, I congratulate you”

DesireCuriosityTemptationArtificeCoquetryArtificialityCoquette
Book:History of My Life, Vols. I & II
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“Modern culture rewards surface-level uniqueness, such as appearance, career path, or social media presence, but punishes true divergence in worldview, thought, or behavior. What people often refer to as "being different" is usually just someone walking down the exact same path as everyone else, but with their steps slightly bent and curved rather than being direct and usual like others. So, although they appear as "individuals" from the outside, inside, they are actually a herd of the same kind of sheep blindly following each other. This is conformity within “individuality.” And this disguise is the thing that gives the tool for the Westerners to call themselves "freedom fighters.”

FreedomSlaveryIndividualityConformityIndividualismModernityDifferenceHerd MentalityArtificialityDeviance
Author:Sov8840
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“Forests are really just a repetition of patterns; it’s why people lose their minds in forests and also on oceans. The human brain needs disruption, I think, and that’s why we make things. You could say that an artist, for instance, finds patterns in everything but I think probably what an artist is really there to do is to tear a big hole in the maddening patterns, to create something that is so itself that it repels everything around it. I’m all for artificiality, is what I’m saying. It’s what humans bring to the table.”

ArtCreativityCreatingPatternsForestsOceansArtificialityMakingDisruptions
Book:Idle Grounds
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“Artificiality is the reality of the mind. Mind has never been and will never have a given nature. It becomes mind by positing itself as the artefact of its own concept. By realizing itself as the artefact of its own concept, it becomes able to transform itself according to its own necessary concept by first identifying, and then replacing or modifying, its conditions of realization, disabling and enabling constraints. Mind is the craft of applying itself to itself. The history of the mind is therefore quite starkly the history of artificialization. Anyone and anything caught up in this history is predisposed to thoroughgoing reconstitution. Every ineffable will be theoretically disenchanted and every scared will be practically desanctified.”

MindArtificialityArtificialization
Book:Intelligence and Spirit
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“In the future, everything will be free. Everything will be liberated, and thus stripped of permanence, solidity, stability, certainty, and coherence. The identities people embrace will become shapeable like water—so much so that the very notion of identity will vanish. Because if everything can be anything, if everything can be labeled, defined, decorated, and marketed endlessly, then nothing is anything. An era will arrive that is so “free,” so soaked in infinite rights, that a rare few who glimpse the fundamental slavery hidden within this endless liberty will begin to yearn for authoritarian and totalitarian regimes—as if feeling nostalgia for one’s own tyrant.”

ValuesFreedomLibertyIdentityFutureCapitalismIndividualismTotalitarianismFluidityArtificiality
Author:Sov8840
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“Some people think they can find satisfaction in good food, fine clothes, lively music, and sexual pleasure. However, when they have all these things, they are not satisfied. They realize happiness is not simply having their material needs met. Thus, society has set up a system of rewards that go beyond material goods. These include titles, social recognition, status, and political power, all wrapped up in a package called self-fulfillment. Attracted by these prizes and goaded on by social pressure, people spend their short lives tiring body and mind to chase after these goals. Perhaps this gives them the feeling that they have achieved something in their lives, but in reality they have sacrificed a lot in life. They can no longer see, hear, act, feel, or think from their hearts. Everything they do is dictated by whether it can get them social gains. In the end, they've spent their lives following other people's demands and never lived a life of their own. How different is this from the life of a slave or a prisoner?”

SelfHappinessCommunitySacrificeHonestySlaveryGenuineEmptinessTaoismBe YourselfDishonestyPrestigeAuthenticPhonyStatusSocial PressureArtificialitySocial Role
Book:Lieh-tzu: A Taoist Guide to Practical Living
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“We shall never know whether thought is an imposture, and that is providential. 'The people is, in some cases, so enlightened that it is no longer indifferent to anything' (Montesquieu). That is indeed the end point: when there is no longer anything about which there is nothing to say. Verdict of a Chinese writer on a monstrous tree that is at once a blackberry and a bamboo: 'any disorder appearing in nature is the sign of a hidden disorder in the administration of the Empire ... Order restored in nature clearly indicates satisfaction in heaven.' Our current blossoming of monsters and clones, hybrids and chimeras, our systematic mixing of mores and cultures, sexes and genes, cannot but attest to an irremediable disorder in the highest spheres of the Empire.”

RevolutionThoughtEmpireArtificiality
Book:Cool Memories V: 2000 - 2004
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“Faith exalts the human heart, by removing it from the market-place, making it sacred and unexchangeable. Under the jurisdiction of religion our deeper feelings are sacralised, so as to become raw material for the ethical life: the life lived in judgement. When faith declines, however, the sacred is unprotected from marauders; the heart can be captured and put on sale. When this happens the human heart becomes kitsch. The clichéd kiss, the doe-eyed smile, the Christmas-card sentiments advertise what cannot be advertised without ceasing to be. They therefore commit the salesman to nothing; they can be bought and sold without emotional hardship, since the emotion, being a fantasy product, no longer exists in its committed and judgement-bearing form.”

FaithBeliefArtificiality
Book:An Intelligent Person's Guide to Modern Culture
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“The word nature has many senses; but if we preserve the one which etymology justifies, and which is the most philosophical as well, nature should mean the principle of birth or genesis, the universal mother, the great cause, or system of causes, that brings phenomena to light. If we take the word nature in this sense, it may be said that Lucretius, more than any other man, is the poet of nature. Of course, being an ancient, he is not particularly a poet of landscape. He runs deeper than that; he is a poet of the source of landscape, a poet of matter. A poet of landscape might try to suggest, by well-chosen words, the sensations of light, movement, and form which nature arouses in us; but in this attempt he would encounter the insuperable difficulty which Lessing long ago pointed out, and warned poets of: I mean the unfitness of language to render what is spatial and material; its fitness to render only what, like language itself, is bodiless and flowing,—action, feeling, and thought. It is noticeable, accordingly, that poets who are fascinated by pure sense and seek to write poems about it are called not impressionists, but symbolists; for in trying to render some absolute sensation they render rather the field of association in which that sensation lies, or the emotions and half-thoughts that shoot and play about it in their fancy. They become—against their will, perhaps—psychological poets, ringers of mental chimes, and listeners for the chance overtones of consciousness. Hence we call them symbolists, mixing perhaps some shade of disparagement in the term, as if they were symbolists of an empty, super-subtle, or fatuous sort. For they play with things luxuriously, making them symbols for their thoughts, instead of mending their thoughts intelligently, to render them symbols for things. A poet might be a symbolist in another sense,—if he broke up nature, the object suggested by landscape to the mind, and reverted to the elements of landscape, not in order to associate these sensations lazily together, but in order to build out of them in fancy a different nature, a better world, than that which they reveal to reason. The elements of landscape, chosen, emphasized, and recombined for this purpose, would then be symbols for the ideal world they were made to suggest, and for the ideal life that might be led in that paradise. Shelley is a symbolic landscape poet in this sense. To Shelley, as Francis Thompson has said, nature was a toy-shop; his fancy took the materials of the landscape and wove them into a gossamer world, a bright ethereal habitation for new-born irresponsible spirits. Shelley was the musician of landscape; he traced out its unrealized suggestions; transformed the things he saw into the things he would fain have seen. In this idealization it was spirit that guided him, the bent of his wild and exquisite imagination, and he fancied sometimes that the grosser landscapes of earth were likewise the work of some half-spiritual stress, of some restlessly dreaming power. In this sense, earthly landscape seemed to him the symbol of the earth spirit, as the starlit crystal landscapes of his verse, with their pensive flowers, were symbols in which his own fevered spirit was expressed, images in which his passion rested.”

RealityPoetryNatureMaterialArtificiality
Book:Three Philosophical Poets: Lucretius, Dante And Goethe
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“Man’s life is a cheat and a disappointment; All things are unreal, Unreal or disappointing: The Catherine wheel, the pantomime cat, The prizes given at the children’s party, The prize awarded for the English Essay, The scholar’s degree, the statesman’s decoration. All things become less real, man passes From unreality to unreality. This man is obstinate, blind, intent On self-destruction, Passing from deception to deception, From grandeur to grandeur to final illusion, Lost in the wonder of his own greatness, The enemy of society, enemy of himself.”

LifeRealityFreedomArtificiality
Book:Murder in the Cathedral
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“Every year that I live here it is as though another of my personalities is left behind, like a variation in a Passacaglia, leaving me nearer the first and last plain theme. It is not only that as one grows older the passions and vanities fade, nor that the pressure of the present day obliges one to live an ever simpler life, to make and to do with one's own hands whatever is necessary, to be forever saying goodbye to civilization. It is rather that civilization has turned to shoddy, plastic and sham, has become a cage with bars of cliché, so that one must get out. Here on my island the years have opened like a rose in the sun, the fury of standardization has missed one little byway, and events have remained in their real dimension as reactions of the human heart, limitless, yet dependent on its fleeting pulse.”

PeaceSilenceSolitudeSimplicityEscapeTimelessnessIslandArtificialityCloisterOff The Grid
Book:Yew Hall
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“It is indeed acceptable practice to sometimes split an infinitive. If infinitive-splitting makes available just the shade of meaning you desire or if avoiding the separation creates a confusing ambiguity or patent artificiality, you are entitled to happily go ahead and split!”

IfsWritingSometimesDesirePracticeAvailableSeparationShadeAcceptableSplitsEntitledAvoidingConfusingAmbiguityPatentsSplittingArtificialityInfinitive
Book:Lederer on Language: A Celebration of English, Good Grammar, and Wordplay
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“Every style seems completely appropriate to its epoch. We cannot imagine Madame de Pompadour, or the Empress Josephine, or the early Victorian lady in anything but the clothes she actually wore. Each represents completely the ideals of her time: elegant artificiality or post-Revolutionary morals, or the prudery of the rising middle class.”

SeemsMoralClassImagineMiddleFashionStyleClothesIdealsPostsRevolutionaryRisingAppropriateMiddle ClassElegantVictorianEpochArtificialityEmpresses
Author:James Laver
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“In horror stories or in fairy tales, the fascination with the morbid is also, at least for me, a way to prepare for the unthinkable… That’s why it’s very important for me to show the artificiality of it all, because the real horrors of the world are unmatchable, and they’re too profound. It’s much easier to absorb – to be entertained by it, but also to let it affect you psychologically – if it’s done in a fake, humorous, artificial way.”

IfsWorldWayImportantRealDoneStoriesShowsEasierHorrorHumorousProfoundTalesFakeFairyArtificialFairy TaleFascinationUnthinkableMorbidHorror StoriesArtificiality
Author:Cindy Sherman
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“Artificiality is one curse that will drop away the moment we kneel at Jesus' feet and surrender ourselves to His meekness. Then we will not care what people think of us so long as God is pleased. Then what we are will be everything; what we appear will take its place far down the scale of interest for us. Apart from sin we have nothing of which to be ashamed. Only an evil desire to shine makes us want to appear other than we are.”

PeopleThinkingWantLongMomentsCareDesireEvilJesusInterestSinFeetShiningScalesSurrenderCurseAshamedMeeknessArtificiality
Author:Aiden Wilson Tozer
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“As one who was never terribly enamored of Hillary Clinton's personality to start with, I grudgingly admit to enjoying her recent near-tears transformation. Plenty of critics concede her rarely seen emotion was heartfelt, but also that it was due to the 20-hour-day rigors of the campaign trail, making her perhaps the only candidate ever to win the New Hampshire primary because she needed a nap. Still, it was refreshing to watch her punch through the icy crust of her own phoniness, so that the molten core of artificiality could gush forth.”

StillsWinningEnjoyHoursEmotionWatchesTearsPersonalityNeededTransformationClintonCriticsDuesCampaignsCorePlentyPrimariesCandidatesTrailsHeartfeltNapsRefreshingIcyRigorEnamoredHampshireNew HampshireArtificiality
Author:Matt Labash
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“The garden reconciles human art and wild nature, hard work and deep pleasure, spiritual practice and the material world. It is a magical place because it is not divided. The many divisions and polarizations that terrorize a disenchanted world find peaceful accord among mossy rock walls, rough stone paths, and trimmed bushes. Maybe a garden sometimes seems fragile, for all its earth and labor, because it achieves such an extraordinary delicate balance of nature and human life, naturalness and artificiality. It has its own liminality, its point of balance between great extremes.”

WorldLifeHumansArtSometimesHardSeemsEarthSpiritualPleasurePracticePathAchieveRocksMaterialsHard WorkWallBalanceGardenLaborStonesExtraordinaryExtremesPeacefulHuman LifeRoughDivisionDividedFragileDelicateAccordReconcileFinding PeaceSpiritual PracticeMaterial WorldPolarizationArtificialityMagical PlacesDisenchanted
Author:Thomas Moore
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“Life creeps slowly upward.... When some forgotten inventor of the older world smote his rival or enemy with a branch of wood and found that it was good and thereafter made a practice of smiting rivals and enemies with branches of wood, then, and on that day, artificiality may be said to have begun. Then, and on that day, was begun a revolution destined to change the history of life. Then, and on that day, was laid the cornerstone of that most tremendous of artifices, CIVILIZATION!”

WorldMayMadeSaidFoundEnemyPracticeRevolutionCivilizationForgottenWoodsBranchesDestinedRivalsInventorCreepsCornerstonesArtificeArtificialityHistory Of Life
Book:The Kempton-Wase Letters
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“You know what I do? I listen to other people, stumbling about with their half thoughts and half sentences and their clumsy feelings that they can't express, and it hurts me. So I go home and burnish it and polish it and weld it to a rhythmic frame, make the dull colors gleam, mute the garish artificiality to pastels, so it doesn't hurt any more: that's my poem. I know what they want to say, and I say it for them.”

PeopleKnowsWantFeelingsHomeHurtHalfColorSentencesDullIt HurtsPolishHurt MeMuteStumblingClumsyGleamArtificialityPastel
Book:Babel-17
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“Adam and Eve entered the world naked and unashamed - naked and pure-minded. And no descendant of theirs has ever entered it otherwise. All have entered it naked, unashamed, and clean in mind. They entered it modest. They had to acquire immodesty in the soiled mind, there was no other way to get it. ... The convention mis-called "modesty" has no standard, and cannot have one, because it is opposed to nature and reason and is therefore an artificiality and subject to anyone's whim - anyone's diseased caprice.”

WorldWayMindReasonSubjectsPureStandardsCleanNakedAcquireClothingsAdamConventionsModestyModestWhimDescendantsAdam And EveDiseasedCapriceArtificiality
Author:Mark Twain
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“There is no such thing as beauty. If your culture says, 'This is a beautiful girl,' that's within the framework of your culture. If you're brought up in an island where people have pointed heads, that would be 'beautiful' in your terms. All these mythological structures is what gets us into trouble; the artificiality of our values that get us into trouble.”

PeopleIfsWould BeBeautifulValuesCultureGirlTermTroubleStructureIslandsFrameworkBeautiful GirlArtificiality
Author:Jacque Fresco
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“A mutually fulfilled sexual union between two people is the rarest sensation which life can provide. But it is not quite real. It stops when the telephone rings. Such a passion can be kept at its early strength only by adding to it either more and more unhappiness (jealousy, separation, doubt, renunciation), or more and more artificiality (drink, technique, stage-illusions). Whoever has missed this has never lived, who lives for it alone is but partly alive.”

PeopleTwoRealPassionDoubtAliveStageDrinkIllusionUnionsTechniqueRingsSeparationUnhappinessSensationsFulfilledTelephonesRenunciationArtificiality
Author:Cyril Connolly
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“How does life become totally painful By total retreat. Total noninspection becomes total pain.But existence is basically composed of a very few truths onto which have hung a great many artificialities and which man has adorned with enormous numbers of lies. And man is prisoner of his own shadows. Now one of the things you can do with man is to get him to look up and find out that he can look through the shadows and look at the shadows and find out what they are.”

MenLooksDoePainLyingCan DoNumbersExistenceShadowPainfulEnormousLook UpGreat MenPrisonerHungRetreatArtificiality
Author:L. Ron Hubbard
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