The magic of photography is metaphysical. What you see in the photograph isn't what you saw at the time. The real skill of photogr...aphy is organised visual lying.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There is a wilderness of commonplace and much that is ugly and poor.... there seems no inspiration, no evolvement of the beautiful..., no intricate poetic conception, no freshness. It is all "technique, technique." There is little independence of vision; all "treatment" with no apprehension of the thing to treat.... They are adventurous, these artists. They draw admirably; they do not color so well, and they have few ideals.... that ideal which was once the real world of the artist seems to have fled, and that present world, "all around us lying," does not seem to have revealed itself to the artist with its truest and most tender grace.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The trouble with lying and deceiving is that their efficiency depends entirely upon a clear notion of the truth that the liar and ...deceiver wishes to hide. In this sense, truth, even if it does not prevail in public, possesses an ineradicable primacy over all falsehoods.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If I were in the unenviable position of having to study my work my points of departure would be the "Naught is more real ..." and ...the "Ubi nihil vales ..." both already in Murphy and neither very rational.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I know those little phrases that seem so innocuous and, once you let them in, pollute the whole of speech. Nothing is more real th...an nothing. They rise up out of the pit and know no rest until they drag you down into its dark.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The media transforms the great silence of things into its opposite. Formerly constituting a secret, the real now talks constantly.... News reports, information, statistics, and surveys are everywhere.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If Nature denies eternity to beings, it follows that their destruction is one of her laws. Now, once we observe that destruction i...s so useful to her that she absolutely cannot dispense with it ... from this moment onward the idea of annihilation which we attach to death ceases to be real ... what we call the end of the living animal is no longer a true finis, but a simple transformation, a transmutation of matter. According to these irrefutable principles, death is hence no more than a change of form, an imperceptible passage from one existence into another.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I regard as a mortal sin not only the lying of the senses in matters of love, but also the illusion which the senses seek to creat...e where love is only partial. I say, I believe, that one must love with all of one's being, or else live, come what may, a life of complete chastity.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The highest perfection of politeness is only a beautiful edifice, built, from the base to the dome, of ungraceful and gilded forms... of charitable and unselfish lying.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »