Oliver Goldsmith Quotes

You are to draw not reality, but the appearance of reality!

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

Of all lies, art is the least untrue.

I desire you would use all your skill to paint my picture truly like me, and not flatter me at all; but remark all these roughnesses, pimples, warts, and everything as you see me, otherwise I will never pay a farthing for it.

Salome had but seven veils; the artist has a thousand.

You know what ART stands for? Above Real Truth.

No picture can be good which deceives by its imitation, for the very reason that nothing can be beautiful which is not true.

That's the question: is truth an illusion, or is illusion truth, or are they essentially the same? Myself, I don't care what anybody says about me as long as it isn't true.

Artists use frauds to make human beings seem more wonderful than they really are. Dancers show us human beings who move much more gracefully than human beings really move. Films and books and plays show us people talking much more entertainingly than people really talk, make paltry human enterprises seem important. Singers and musicians show us human beings making sounds far more lovely than human beings really make. Architects give us temples in which something marvelous is obviously going on. Actually, practically nothing is going on.

A painter will paint a cobbler, carpenter, or any other artist, though he knows nothing of their arts; and, if he is a good artist, he may deceive children or simple persons, when he shows them his picture of a carpenter from a distance, and they will fancy that they are looking at a real carpenter.

Realism absorbs the ideal by adding a few small imperfections. Example: it paints a few specks of mud on the white gown of the Lady in the Garden.

It seems dangerous to be a portrait artist who does commissions for clients because everyone wants to be flattered, so they pose in such a way that there's nothing left of truth.

Photography knows how to authenticate its misrepresentations.

Film is 24 lies per second at the service of truth, or at the service of the attempt to find the truth.

Is not anyone with any degree of mental honesty conscious of telling lies all day long, both in talking and writing, simply because lies will fall into artistic shape when truth will not?

If we examine a work of ordinary art, by means of a powerful microscope, all traces of resemblance to nature will disappear - but the closest scrutiny of the photogenic drawing discloses only a more absolute truth, a more perfect identity of aspect with the thing represented.

There is no alleviation for the sufferings of mankind except veracity of thought and of action, and the resolute facing of the world as it is when the garment of make-believe by which pious hands have hidden its uglier features is stripped off.

The heart lies and the head plays tricks with us, but the eyes see true.

There is nothing in the world more difficult than candor, and nothing easier than flattery. If there is a hundredth of a fraction of a false note to candor, it immediately produces dissonance, and as a result, exposure. But in flattery, even if everything is false down to the last note, it is still pleasant, and people will listen not without pleasure; with coarse pleasure, perhaps, but pleasure nevertheless.

I don't try to be clever at all. The idea that I could see what no one else can is an illusion.

the problem with knowing is that it takes away the possibility of pretending!

Truth, like light, is blinding. Lies, on the other hand, are a beautiful dusk, which enhances the value of each object.

When others asked the truth of me, I was convinced it was not the truth they wanted, but an illusion they could bear to live with.

The purity men love is like the mists which envelope the earth, and not like the azure ether beyond.