Imitates Quotes & Sayings

Life imitates art far more than art imitates Life. — Oscar Wilde

Art sometimes imitates life. When it does, science fiction presages what form that life may take. — Alan Joshua

At the inauguration of each sentence, the writer commences with an optimistic sense of curiosity. Similar to an inquisitive explorer, a writer begins each thoughtful decree with an appreciative sense of the unknown and ends with a reverent regard for the unanswerable. Repeating this instigating act of discovery by placing a combination of sentences down on paper creates a unique verdict. The writer's compilation of pronouncements expresses their interpretation of life. Replicating this creative endeavor in the futile effort to say it all imitates the revolving mystery of life where physical reality and mysterious forces of nature operate upon humankind. — Kilroy J. Oldster

The Ruffed Pandanga of Borneo and Rotherham spreads out his feathers in his courtship dance and imitates Winston Churchill and Tommy Cooper on one leg. The padanga is dying out because the female padanga doesn't take it too seriously. — Mike Harding

At first, art imitates life. Then life will imitate art.Then life will find its very existence from the arts. — Fyodor Dostoevsky

Naturalistic art, as we know it, is an art which imitates the appearance of things, not as they are in reality, but as they appear at one moment from the point of view of a single spectator. This is the effect of perspective. Nothing of this sort existed in prehistory. — Sigfried Giedion

The immature artist imitates. The mature artist steals. — Lionel Trilling

Thus poetry, regarded as a vehicle of thought, is especially impressive partly because it obeys all the laws of effective speech, and partly because in so doing it imitates the natural utterances of excitement. — Herbert Spencer

Good painter imitates nature, bad ones spews it up. — Miguel De Cervantes

Art imitates nature not in its effects as such, but in its causes, in its 'manner,' in its process, which are nothing but a participation in and a derivation of actual objects, of the Art of God himself. — Paul Claudel

There are three arts which are concerned with all things: one which uses, another which makes, and a third which imitates them. — Plato

Before they are preachers, leaders or church planters, the disciples are to be lovers! This is the test of whether or not they have known Jesus. This remains the case today: this cross-love is the primary, dynamic test of whether or not we have understood the gospel word and experienced its power ... It is our cross-love for each other that proclaims the truth of the gospel to a watching and skeptical world. Our love for one another, to the extent that it imitates and conforms to the cross-love of Jesus for us, is evangelistic.
pp. 56-7 — Tim Chester

One of the masked women imitates the sounds she hears and the ubiquitous tune, as she sways and runs her hand through her hair.
A rutting mare, a slender block of ice, warm for others but not for herself, she seems to be split in two: fire from the waist down, straight lines above.
Growing more sensual by the minute, more labile and smiling, her mask redder, flame is her nest, the flash of her eyes stony gray. — Homero Aridjis

Whenever I think about ancient cultures nostalgia seizes me. Perhaps this is nothing but envy of the sweet slowness of the history of that time. The era of ancient Egyptian culture lasted for several thousand years; the era of Greek antiquity for almost a thousand. In this respect, a single human life imitates the history of mankind; at first it is plunged into immobile slowness, and then only gradually does it accelerate more and more. — Milan Kundera

The sea thus enchants us like music, which, unlike language, never bears the traces of things, never tells us anything about human beings, but imitates the stirrings of the soul. — Marcel Proust

I don't find any direct statements in life. My poetry imitates or reproduces the way knowledge or awareness come to me, which is by fits and starts and by indirection. I don't think poetry arranged in neat patterns would reflect that situation. My poetry is disjunct, but then so is life. — John Ashbery

Art imitates life. It's definitely helpful to feel that way. You feel that way when you're leading a show and you're on a set. — Emily Rose

Life imitates art, but clumsily, copying its movements when it thinks it isn't looking. — Neil Gaiman

The magnetic force is animate, or imitates a soul; in many respects it surpasses the human soul while it is united to an organic body. — William Gilbert

Whenever a man believes that he has the exact truth from God, there is in that man no spirit of compromise. He has not the modesty born of the imperfections of human nature; he has the arrogance of theological certainty and the tyranny born of ignorant assurance. Believing himself to be the slave of God, he imitates his master, and of all tyrants the worst is a slave in power. — Robert Green Ingersoll

The writer of stories or of novels settles on men and imitates them; he exhausts the possibilities of his characters. — Salvatore Quasimodo

Only Zorbas become Buddhas - and Buddha was never a monk, A monk is one who has never been a Zorba and has become enchanted by the words of Buddhas. A monk is an imitator, he is false, pseudo. He imitates Buddhas. He may be Christian, he may be Buddhist, he may be a Hindu - that doesn't make much difference - but he imitates Buddhas. — Rajneesh

I used to be a huge fan. "The Simpsons" taught me a lot about filmmaking. It imitates film, but it's drawn, so everything is super clear — Dagur Kari

He'll be a minister in Spain some day, or, at the very least, ambassador to Washington, he's exactly the kind of pretentious fool with just a thin veneer of cordiality that the Right produces by the dozen and which the Left reproduces and imitates whenever they're in power, as if they were the victims of some form of contagion. — Javier Marias

I feel like art imitates life and life imitates art. — Tia Mowry

At the highest level, there is the general Subject-Self metaphor, which conceptualizes a person as bifurcated. The exact nature of this bifurcation is specified more precisely one level down, where there are five specific instances of the metaphor. These five special cases of the basic Subject-Self metaphor are grounded in four types of everyday experience: (1) manipulating objects, (2) being located in space, (3) entering into social relations, and (4) empathic projection-conceptually projecting yourself onto someone else, as when a child imitates a parent. The fifth special case comes from the Folk Theory of Essences: Each person is seen as having an Essence that is part of the Subject. The person may have more than one Self, but only one of those Selves is compatible with that Essence. This is called the "real" or "true" Self. — George Lakoff

I feel like life imitates art, or art imitates life. I always take on roles that I'm passionate about. — Tia Mowry

The parrot's so funny. He imitates me and I don't even realize he's doing it. I'm walking around the house talking to myself and whistling and the next day he's said something I've said ... it's scary you know? — Mick Ralphs

The consultant buys a bottle of fake blood at a theater supply store and once every lunar month, for four days, imitates having a period by putting some of this blood into the vagina and preventing it from gushing out by using a tampon. After repeating this for four months, the consultant's period will return to normal. — Alejandro Jodorowsky

Here, precisely here, man imitates God: God granted Himself the work of creation, as the highest delight, and He demands that man, too, be a creator of prosperity and the harmonious course of things. And this they call dull! — Nikolai Gogol

The authour who imitates his predecessors only by furnishing himself with thoughts and elegances out of the same general magazine of literature, can with little more propriety be reproached as a plagiary, than the architect can be censured as a mean copier of Angelo or Wren, because he digs his marble out of the same quarry, squares his stones by the same art, and unites them in columns of the same orders. — Samuel Johnson

In one particular chapter in Ulysses, James Joyce imitates every major writing style that's been used by English and American writers over the last 700 years - starting with Beowulf and Chaucer and working his way up through the Renaissance, the Victorian era and on into the 20th century. — Frederick Lenz

The New Atheists believe that science replaces the claims about the world that religion makes - and therefore makes religion redundant. Some of them think that a whole new moral system should be based on science. That's sounding more and more like religion itself to me. But the other unsettling way in which Humanism imitates religion - and perhaps the most notable one in the case of the New Atheists - is its claim that people who do not share its beliefs are not only mistaken but also deluded and perhaps even evil. The line I quoted above about opposition to evolution being a sign of insanity and possibly wickedness comes, of course, from Richard Dawkins.
[Curb your enthusiasm] — Michael Ruse

Life imitates art and art imitates life until both imitate imitation - Reality TV. — Brian Spellman

That life sometimes imitates art is a mere Oscar Wilde-ish curiosity; that it should set about to do so in such unseemly haste that between notes and novel (not to mention between the drafted and the printed page) what had been fiction becomes idle fact, invention history--disconcerting! Especially to a fictionist who, like yours truly, had long since turned his professional back on literary realism in favour of the fabulous irreal, and only in this latest enterprise had projected, not without misgiving, a detente with the realistic tradition. It is as if Reality, a mistress too long ignored, must now settle scores with her errant lover. — John Barth

Civility, which is a disposition to accommodate and oblige others, is essentially the same in every country; but good breeding, asit is called, which is the manner of exerting that disposition, is different in almost every country, and merely local; and every man of sense imitates and conforms to that local good breeding of the place which he is at. — Lord Chesterfield

Life imitates art but art intimidates life. — Dana Gould

For the Chinese, the Greeks, the Mayans, or the Egyptians, nature was a living totality, a creative being. For this reason, art, according to Aristotle, is imitation; the poet imitates the creative gesture of nature. — Octavio Paz

Nature imitates herself. A grain thrown into good ground brings forth fruit; a principle thrown into a good mind brings forth fruit. Everything is created and conducted by the same Master-the root, the branch, the fruits-the principles, the consequences. — Blaise Pascal

A tree gives glory to God by being a tree. For in being what God means it to be it is obeying [God]. It "consents," so to speak, to [God's] creative love. It is expressing an idea which is in God and which is not distinct from the essence of God, and therefore a tree imitates God by being a tree — Thomas Merton

The poetry of life, the inner side of nature, rises near the surface to meet the eyes of the man who makes. The advantage gained by the carpenter of Nazareth at his bench is the inheritance of every workman as he imitates his maker in the divine - that is, honest - work. — George MacDonald

We are imitating Nature, who is variable; and he who imitates her cannot be blamed. — Michael A. Ledeen

Art imitates Nature in this; not to dare is to dwindle. — John Updike

Possible Ending #16 (Life Imitates Art Imitates Life Imitates Art Imitates): I'd seen this movie. Obvious ending: outright betrayal, lesson learned, life is heartbreak, people who mean well still fuck you over, everyone's sad, greedy, looking out for number one, no consideration for the fragile fat boy whose displayed cynicism only masks a deeper hope that everyone's okay, will ultimately end up all right, that love exists, that happiness may not be stable but at least comes in bursts, that everything worthwhile wasn't just a self-created illusion. — Adam Wilson

Art imitates life. Life imitates high school. — Brad Holland

Nice,' I say, realizing only afterward that I've mimicked her, a bad habit of mine; I'm like one of those animals that imitates its predators to survive. — Melissa Bank

Art imitates life and, sometimes, life imitates art. It's a weird combination of elements. — Bruce Willis

Like a groupie incognito posing as a real singer, life imitates art. — Lana Del Rey

Woe to the one by whom scandal comes!" Jesus reserves his most solemn warning for the adults who seduce children into the infernal prison of scandal. The more the imitation is innocent and trusting, the more the one who imitates is easily scandalized, and the more the seducer is guilty of abusing this innocence. Scandals are so formidable that to put us on guard against them, Jesus resorts to an uncharacteristic hyperbolic style: "If your hand scandalizes you, cut it off; if you eye scandalizes you, pull it out" (Matt. 18:8-9). — Rene Girard

While reading Kasparov's book How Life Imitates Chess on my Kindle, I idly clicked on "popular highlights" to see what passages other readers had found interesting - and wound up becoming fascinated by a section on chess strategy I'd only lightly skimmed myself. — Clive Thompson

Music imitates (represents) the passions or states of the soul, such as gentleness, anger, courage, temperance, and their opposites. — Aristotle.

Any spirit that permits compromise with the world is a false spirit. Any religious movement that imitates the world in any of its manifestations is false to the cross of Christ and on the side of the devil. — Aiden Wilson Tozer

Photography can never grow up if it imitates some other medium. It has to walk alone; it has to be itself. — Berenice Abbott

One who imitates what is bad always goes beyond his model; while one who imitates what is good always comes up short of it. — Francesco Guicciardini

The mind, by its very nature, persistently tries to live forever, resisting age and attempting to give itself a form ... When a person passes his prime and his life begins to lose true vigor and charm, his mind starts functioning as if it were another form of life; it imitates what life does, eventually doing what life cannot do. — Yukio Mishima

Notice, too, how often the standard of help - rehabilitation, as it is usually called - is not just made up of the common morality of middle class society, but specifically in how far the client or patient or case imitates and becomes like the case worker or probation person or professional - that is, in how far the one who is being helped becomes like the one who is helping him. — William Stringfellow

I think it is the art of the glimpse. If the novel is like an intricate Renaissance painting, the short story is an impressionist painting. It should be an explosion of truth. Its strength lies in what it leaves out just as much as what it puts in, if not more. It is concerned with the total exclusion of meaninglessness. Life, on the other hand, is meaningless most of the time. The novel imitates life, where the short story is bony, and cannot wander. It is essential art. — William Trevor

Far from being a paradox, this invitation is more reasonable than that of our modern gurus, who ask their disciples to imitate them as the great man or woman who imitates no one. Jesus, by contrast, invites us to do what he himself does, to become like him a perfect imitator of God the Father. — Rene Girard

Look at the four-spaced year
That imitates four seasons of our lives;
First Spring, that delicate season, bright with flowers,
Quickening, yet shy, and like a milk-fed child,
Its way unsteady while the countryman
Delights in promise of another year.
Green meadows wake to bloom, frail shoots and grasses,
And then Spring turns to Summer's hardiness,
The boy to manhood. There's no time of year
Of greater richness, warmth, and love of living,
New strength untried. And after Summer, Autumn,
First flushes gone, the temperate season here
Midway between quick youth and growing age,
And grey hair glinting when the head turns toward us,
Then senile Winter, bald or with white hair,
Terror in palsy as he walks alone. — Ovid

Life doesn't imitate art, it imitates bad television. — Woody Allen

Whoever imitates a people is one of them. — Abu Dawood

Life imitates art
but badly. — Edward Abbey

Road racing imitates life, the way it would be without the corruptive influence of civilization. When you see an enemy lying on the ground, what's your first reaction? To help him to his feet. In road racing, you kick him to death — Tim Krabbe

The artist, even when he imitates nature, always feels himself to be not a slave but a demigod. — Soseki Natsume

Life Imitates Art — Oscar Wilde

Take every opportunity to remind someone,
'I love you'
Today.
For whether in thought, intention, disposition, prayer, word, action or deed, no act so nobly imitates the Divine Reality - bestowing upon the human spirit the dignity, hope, courage and strength we all need to realize our full potential in the journey of life - as a sincere, authentic, heartfelt expression of love. — Mac MacKenzie

As a social and as a personal force, religion has become a dependent variable. It does not originate; it reacts. It does not denounce; it adapts. It does not set forth new models of conduct and sensibility; it imitates. Its rhetoric is without deep appeal; the worship it organizes is without piety. It has become less a revitalization of the spirit in permanent tension with the world than a respectable distraction from the sourness of life. — C. Wright Mills

Historically, actors have been made very famous for roles that were something that was far - - Richard Widmark comes to mind (playing Tommy Udo in "Kiss of Death") or something like that, where you do some famous role and everybody imitates you for the rest of your life. But obviously it's much more fun to play something you're not than it is to play something you are. — Clint Eastwood

An original writer is not one who imitates nobody, but one whom nobody can imitate. — Francois-Rene De Chateaubriand

Grace imitates modesty, as politeness imitates kindness. — Joseph Joubert

Art, as far as it is able, follows nature, as a pupil imitates his master; thus your art must be, as it were, God's grandchild. — Dante Alighieri

In their perverted way all humanity imitates you. Yet they put themselves at a distance from you and exalt themselves against you. But even by thus imitating you they acknowledge that you are the creator of all nature and so concede that there is no palace where one can entirely escape from you. — Augustine Of Hippo

Honour's a sacred tie, the law of kings,
The noble mind's distinguishing perfection
That aids and strengthens virtue where it meets her
And imitates her actions where she is not:
It is not to be sported with. — Joseph Addison

The young mind is pliable and imitates, but in more advanced states grows rigid and must be warmed and softened before it will receive a deep impression. — Joshua Reynolds

Talent imitates, but genius steals. — T. S. Eliot

Nature, so far as in her lies, imitates God. — Alfred Lord Tennyson

The immature poet imitates, the mature poet plagiarizes, — T. S. Eliot

There is no original or primary gender a drag imitates, but gender is a kind of imitation for which there is no original. — Judith Butler

do not want you to become lazy, but to imitates those who through faith and patiencet inherit what has been promised.u — Anonymous

Look at airport security now. What started out as definite racial profiling is now where the computer picks a name. That's why you get a seven-month-old getting a pat down. [Imitates a security officer.] "Check the diapers. They're full." — Robin Williams

The theater has been called the pulse of the people. — Abigail Adams

But you are not one of us. For you, this thing is irreversible except by death, and not only the flesh is altered. Only the strongest of you can resist the collapse of the soul into the form; the mind is lazy, it naturally imitates the body. I have known none of you yet who can remain human when they wear another skin. But the thing is yours to do, if you should wish to do it. — Catherynne M Valente

Art may imitate life, but life imitates TV. — Ani DiFranco

Any black person who clings to the misguided notion that white people represent the embodiment of all that is evil and black people all that is good remains wedded to the very logic of Western metaphysical dualism that is the heart of racist binary thinking. Such thinking is not liberatory. Like the racist educational ideology it mirrors and imitates, it invites a closing of the mind. — Bell Hooks

Music directly imitates the passions or states of the soul ... when one listens to music that imitates a certain passion, he becomes imbued withthe same passion; and if over a long time he habitually listens to music that rouses ignoble passions, his whole character will be shaped to an ignoble form. — Aristotle.

And yet there are many times when it does not make any difference what pattern one uses. One thing is certain. The more bedraggled the fly gets the better the trout like it. I think there is a reason for this. I think the bedraggled half worn out wet fly more closely imitates a nymph than a new one does. Most commercial flies are tied too bushy and full. A little trimming of wings and thinning out of hackles will often work wonders. — Ray Bergman

Not only does art imitate life but life imitates art. Perhaps we not only learn about life from stories, perhaps we make our lives through the stories we tell ourselves about the things that happen to us. — Ramona Koval

The successful publishing house is the one that can guess ahead, not the one that imitates the past. — Helen Jacobs

Each man in his life honors, and imitates as well as he can, that god to whose choir he belonged, while he is uncorrupted in his first incarnation here; and in the fashion he has thus learned, he bears himself to his beloved as well as to the rest. So, then, each chooses from among the beautiful a love conforming to his kind, and then, as if his chosen were his god, he sets him up and robes him for worship. — Mary Renault

Now that there is no calling out of injustice, no yelling, no cursing, no finger wagging or head shaking, the media decides to take up the mantle when on December 12, 2012, two weeks after Serena is named WTA Player of the Year, the Dane Caroline Wozniacki, a former number-one player, imitates Serena by stuffing towels in her top and shorts, all in good fun, at an exhibition match. Racist? CNN wants to know if outrage is the proper response. — Claudia Rankine

If one imitates the upright, one becomes upright. If one imitates the crooked, one becomes crooked. — Christie Watson

Habit, if wisely and skillfully formed, becomes truly a second nature; but unskillfully and unmethodically depicted, it will be as it were an ape of nature, which imitates nothing to the life, but only clumsily and awkwardly — Francis Bacon

Art not only imitates nature, but also completes its deficiencies. — Aristotle.

I am for an art that imitates the human, that is comic, if necessary, or violent, or whatever is necessary. I am for an art that takes its form from the lines of life itself, that twists and extends and accumulates and spits and drips, and is heavy and coarse and blunt and sweet and stupid as life itself. — Claes Oldenburg

Commodified fantasy takes no risks: it invents nothing, but imitates and trivializes. It proceeds by depriving the old stories of their intellectual and ethical complexity, turning their action into violence, their actors to dolls, and their truth-telling to sentimental platitude. — Karen Haber

He who imitates what is evil always goes beyond the example that is set; on the contrary, he who imitates what is good always falls short. — Francesco Guicciardini

Television is much better crafted today then in the 70s. The content is less positive but I'm one of those that feel our entertainment reflects our world, it's not a driver - art imitates life. — Christopher Knight

At the beginning of all growth, everything imitates. — Pramoedya Ananta Toer

No form of art repeats or imitates successfully all that can be said by another; the writer conveys his experience of life along a channel of communication closed to painter, mathematician, musician, film-maker. — Storm Jameson

I'm an actor, and I keep observing people and their reactions to figure out what they are thinking. There's only so much you can do on your own, so you have to keep learning. Art imitates life. — Preity Zinta