Top 100 Small Art Quotes
#1. I'm a person who likes these sort of movies ... sad but moving 'art movies' that normally are at a festival and then they go to a small art house theater and disappear.
Zach Braff
#3. No child, still less a fetus, has ever mastered the art of small talk, or would ever want to. It's an adult device, a covenant with boredom and deceit.
Ian McEwan
#4. Every individual spends a lifetime trying to disprove Copernicus by placing him- or herself at the heart of existence, but a small core of diehards manages to turn it into an art.
John Connolly
#5. In Australia, there aren't a lot of people committed to art, so these communities form that are dedicated to music, theater, cinema, but they're very small. So, they tend to move ahead on the power of collaboration, enthusiasm and creativity.
Joel Edgerton
#6. To be successful in the world of art you must, of course, have talent, although very small talents have gone very far in this age. Just as the microphone gave volume to voices that had none, so does the science of press-agentry magnify limited skills into highly saleable properties.
Marya Mannes
#7. I think the art world ... is a very small pond, and it's a very inbred pond. They rely on information from an elect elite sect of galleries, primarily in New York.
Thomas Kinkade
#8. The art world was very small and the people got together at parties. There was less commercialism.
Claes Oldenburg
#9. To me, art's highest purpose is to entertain, to enlighten, to inspire, to evoke emotion and to change an audience in some way, big or small.
Charity Sunshine Tillemann-Dick
#10. Movies will end up being this esoteric art form, where only singular people will put films out in a small group of theaters.
M. Night Shyamalan
#11. Brains cause technology, society, art, science, soap operas, sin. A remarkable set of effects for such a small chunk of coagulated atoms.
Colin McGinn
#12. In any period it is upon a very small minority that the discerning appreciation of art and literature depends ... They are still a minority, though a larger one, who are capable of endorsing such first-hand judgement by genuine personal response.
F.R. Leavis
#13. As much as we'd like to believe that our work is great and that we're infallible, we're not. Hollywood movies are made for the audience. These are not small European art films we're making.
Harold Ramis
#14. I once saw a small child go to an electric light switch as say, "Mamma, can I open the light?" She was using the age-old language of exploration, the language of art. It was a sort of metaphor, but she was not using it as ornamentation.
Ezra Pound
#15. I wish to be of service to the artists of our own day, by showing them how a small beginning leads to the highest elevation, and how from so noble a situation it is possible to fall to utmost ruin, and consequently, how these arts resemble nature as shown in our human bodies.
Giorgio Vasari
#16. She is not a bulldog, only a woman pressed into the shape of a small jar, possibly attempting to dance in there. It shows in the way she places a seashell on a window sill, a red-painted chair in the corner: she is practiced in the art of creating a still life and taking up residence inside it.
Barbara Kingsolver
#17. I went to college to be a jock and to play on the baseball team. And then, I got cut and realized that that was it for that. I was really small. The other guys were really big, on that team. I was a bit of a theater nerd, and I was an art history major.
Charlie Day
#18. The range of genre that we is very diverse, which makes for a fun and multi-dimensional show, but creating something that flows, depending on what kind of vibe the show is going to be [loud dive bar, small theatre, festival] is a bit of an art a haphazard art at times.
Sarah Burton
#19. In true budo there is no enemy or opponent. True budo is to become one with the universe, not train to become powerful or to throw down some opponent. Rather we train in hopes of being of some use, however small our role may be, in the task of bringing peace to mankind around the world.
Morihei Ueshiba
#20. I have a preference for writing that deals with domestic issues; even in visual art, I like work that focuses on very small aspects of human life. I like movies that have a very narrow focus. I can see how it might be viewed as limiting, but I don't experience it that way.
Carol Windley
#21. Only by assuming an infinitesimally small unit for observation - a differential of history (that is, the common tendencies of men) - and arriving at the art of integration (finding the sum of the infinitesimals) can we hope to discover the laws of history.
Leo Tolstoy
#22. Contemporary art photography is paradoxical. Anyone can look at it and form an opinion about what they see. Yet it usually represents aesthetic and theoretical positions that only a small minority of well-informed viewers can access.
Lucy Soutter
#23. Fighting with a large army under your command is nowise different from fighting with a small one: it is merely a question of instituting signs and signals.
Sun Tzu
#24. Performance art can involve the audience with taste, smell and sounds not available with electronic media and not practical with conventional theater. This is due to the usually small audience.
Jack Bowman
#25. You tell the big lie by carefully selecting only the small, isolated truths, linking them in such a way that that advance the bigger lie by painting a picture inside the viewer's head. The Ascended High Master of this Dark Art is Noam Chomsky.
Bill Whittle
#26. Art is an affirmation of life, a rebuttal of death. And here we blunder into paradox again, for during the creation of any form of art, art which affirms the value and the holiness of life, the artist must die. To serve a work of art, great or small, is to die, to die to self.
Madeleine L'Engle
#27. How much the making of a garden, no matter how small, adds to the joy of living, only those who practice the arts and the science can know.
Ernest Henry Wilson
#28. Unlike film and TV, theater is a luxury object, but one that ordinary middle-class people can still afford. Above all, it isn't a mass medium: Live theater is a small-scale, handmade art form. Intimacy is what makes it special.
Terry Teachout
#29. Living well is an art that can be developed: a love of life and ability to take great pleasure from small offerings and assurance that the world owes you nothing and that every gift is exactly that, a gift.
Maya Angelou
#30. Whether it is a big ship or small ship, the same size hole placed correctly in the hull can sink it.
Ed Parker
#31. I would like the people that buy my clothes to understand that for me it's one small piece of art.
Roberto Cavalli
#32. Alas, if our children lose the crown of life, it will be but a small consolation that they have won the laurels of literature or art.
Charles Spurgeon
#33. Though Marcus' essay extends over 13 pages of small text, at its core is a very simple premise: Contemporary American fiction has lost its innovative edge and its interest in language as art, and Jonathan Franzen is largely, if not exclusively, to blame.
Jess Row
#34. I sort of always had an inkling towards some kind of an art form. I grew up in a very small town, and I just figure-skated. My dad played hockey and I was surrounded by sports, but it wasn't quite doing it for me. I wasn't totally fulfilled, and I did a lot of skating.
Rachel McAdams
#35. This walking business is overrated: I mastered the art of doing it when I was quite small, and in any case, what are taxis for?
Christopher Hitchens
#36. Art's power of persuasion resides in the small personal details of one's own story, and if it weren't for my struggle with dyslexia, I doubt I'd ever have become a writer or known how to teach others to write.
Philip Schultz
#37. If a book comes from the heart, it will contrive to reach other hearts; all art and author-craft are of small amount to that.
Thomas Carlyle
#38. Every work of art is aggressive, Isabella. And every artist's life is a small war or a large one, beginning with oneself and one's limitations. To achieve anything you must first have ambition and then talent, knowledge, and finally the opportunity.
Carlos Ruiz Zafon
#39. Life is short, he thought. Art, or something not life, is long, stretching out endless, like concrete worm. Flat, white, unsmoothed by any passage over or across it. Here I stand. But no longer. Taking the small box, he put the Edfrank jewellery piece away in his coat pocket.
Philip K. Dick
#40. A poem compresses much in a small space and adds music, thus heightening its meaning.
E.B. White
#41. On this hapless earth There 's small sincerity of mirth, And laughter oft is but an art To drown the outcry of the heart.
Hartley Coleridge
#42. For me science is not different from art, except in the one small, crucial detail that experiments speak their own truths, not ours.
Nina Fedoroff
#43. You see the Earth as a bright blue and white Christmas tree ornament in the black sky. It's so small and so fragile - you realize that on that small spot is everything that means everything to you; all of history and art and death and birth and love.
Rusty Schweickart
#44. Thou truly art in jest. Art thou not small/Of stature, if thou art a stormtrooper?
-Leia Organa
Ian Doescher
#45. Yesterday I was thinking about the whole idea of genius and creative people, and the notion that if you create some magical art, somehow that exempts you from having to pay attention to the small things.
Bell Hooks
#46. The art of leading, in operations large or small, is the art of dealing with humanity, of working diligently on behalf of men, of being sympathetic with them, but equally, of insisting that they make a square facing toward their own problems.
Samuel Lyman Atwood Marshall
#47. Childhood is the time and children's books are the place for powerful emotions, powerful language, powerful art ... There is no room for cutesy books, dull books, or books that talk down. Children are not inferior. They may be small in stature but not in what they feel, think, listen, and see.
Betsy Hearne
#48. that I have read many books, but to little purpose, for want of good method; I have confusedly tumbled over divers authors in our libraries, with small profit, for want of art, order, memory, judgment.
Robert Burton
#49. Norway is a small country, about half the size of Sweden, but it has a very good film climate because they have municipal cinemas, so even in the smallest towns you have a cinema that shows art house films from all over the world.
Stellan Skarsgard
#50. We have lost the art of public tenderness, these small gestures of wiping and washing; we have forgotten how abjectly the body welcomes a formal touch.
Anne Enright
#51. The art of Good Eating has two essential points: one must eat only when one is hungry, and one must take small bites.
Mary MacLane
#52. Tragic art is the organization of a small portion of an otherwise meaningless world that gives purpose to an individual existence.
Joshua Foa Dienstag
#53. I select a very small number of things to be sceptical about, such as markets, and on these I am hypersceptic. But I want to be fooled by randomness in art. I want the ceremonial of religion; we are made for it.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#54. Here is how to sit through small openings of your father's first art films, surrounded by surly foreign cigarette smoke and conversations so pretentious you literally cannot believe them, you're sure you have misheard them.
David Foster Wallace
#55. There is no greater picture than that of 10,000 smiling children. No brighter music than their clear-ringing laughter. That I, with my small amusements, have created such precious art is my life's proudest achievement.
P.T. Barnum
#56. For first you write a sentence, And then you chop it small; Then mix the bits and sort them out Just as they chance to fall: The order of the phrases makes no difference at all.
Lewis Carroll
#57. The artist's conception of his art or the scientist's of his science is usually as great as his conception of his own worth is small.
Giacomo Leopardi
#58. To make us feel small in the right way is a function of art; men can only make us feel small in the wrong way.
E. M. Forster
#59. His hold is tight, our fingers are laced, and he's occasionally rubbing circles on the top of my hand with his thumb. These small gestures definitely make handholding seem more like an art.
Kim Karr
#60. All art is an intensely vulnerable gesture, and it is made with no small amounts of risk, and fear. So, I have plenty of sympathy for self-defense mechanisms, especially among artists.
Steven Erikson
#61. Fortunately art is a community effort - a small but select community living in a spiritualized world endeavoring to interpret the wars and the solitudes of the flesh.
Allen Ginsberg
#62. Only passions, and great passions, can raise the soul to great things. Without them there is no sublimity, either in morals or in creativity. Art returns to infancy, and virtue becomes small- minded.
Denis Diderot
#63. To create a work of art, great or small, is work, hard work, and work requires discipline and order.
Madeleine L'Engle
#64. I must try to remember that Art with Small Boys is best left to professionals, or people with ready access to tranquilizers.
Gil McNeil
#65. A small artist is content with art; a great artist is content with nothing except everything.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
#66. LEIA Thou truly art in jest. Art thou not small Of stature, if thou art a stormtrooper? Does Empire shrink for want of taller troops? The Empire's evil ways, I'll grant, are grand, But must its soldiers want for fear of height?
Ian Doescher
#67. Ill-weaved ambition, how much art thou shrunk! When that this body did contain a spirit a kingdom for it was to small a bound. But now two paces of the vilest earth are room enough
William Shakespeare
#68. Such is life, my fellow-mummers-just like a poor player that bluffs and feints his hour upon the stage, and then cheapens down to mere nonentity. But let me not hear any small witticism to the further effect that its story is a tale told by a vulgarian, full of slang and blanky, signifying-nothing.
Joseph Furphy
#69. We will arrange for 'religion' to become a small subdepartment of ordinary life; it will be quite safe - harmless, in fact - with church life carefully separated off from everything else in the world, whether politics, art, sex, economics, or whatever.
N. T. Wright
#70. A picture book is a small door to the enormous world of the visual arts, and they're often the first art a young person sees.
Tomie DePaola
#71. I think if you are a musician, and artist, you have to have a certain courage. Repeating yourself or photocopying other's art... it's cowardice. If you actually risk your career to do something new, even if it's in a very small way, then it's art.
Thomas Gabriel Fischer
#72. To equip a pedestrian with shelter, bedding, utensils, food, and other necessities, in a pack so light and small that he can carry it without overstrain, is really a fine art.
Horace Kephart
#73. The discovery I announce to the public is one of the small number which, by their principles, their results, and the beneficial influence which they exert upon the arts, are counted among the most useful and extraordinary inventions.
Louis Daguerre
#74. I think the art film, or the auteur-driven film - and not only foreign, but domestic films following that path - can get a small share of the box office. And I think that small share may open up a little bit.
Roger Corman
#75. The kinds of truth that art gives us many, many times are small truths. They don't have the resonance of an encyclical from the Pope stating an eternal truth, but they partake of the quality of eternity. There is a sort of timeless delight in them.
Seamus Heaney
#76. The malady of civilized man is his knowledge of death. The good artist, like the wise man, addresses himself to life and invests with his private vision the deeds and thoughts of men. The creation of a work of art, like an act of love, is our one small yes at the center of a vast no.
Gore Vidal
#77. But I, Caesar, have not sought to amass wealth by the practice of my art, having been rather contented with a small fortune and reputation, than desirous of abundance accompanied by a want of reputation.
Vitruvius
#78. Everything here is a small offense and not of value as art or confession. It is not a whim. It is an attempt to peel another putrid skin.
Patti Smith
#79. I do quite a lot of art, with a small 'a'. I guess that is how I was dredged up, with paints and crayons. Even when I was at nursery, I knew instinctively how to mix colours, how to make purple or orange.
Amanda Harlech
#80. What adults call 'wrong' in Child Art is the most beautiful and most precious. I value highly those things done by small children. They are the first and purest source of artistic creation.
Franz Cizek
#81. The art of living in a small town is one of the most difficult to acquire.
Doris Lessing
#82. I believe that you always have to believe. It's the only way; after all we both believe that we will do this exhibition. But I can't believe in God, as such, he's either too big or too small for me, and always incomprehensible, unbelievable.
Gerhard Richter
#84. You would think," added Art, "that a wedding was a great thing."
"Well," replied Old Hector, "it's not a small thing, as a rule. They contrive, one way or another, to make a lot of it.
Neil M. Gunn
#85. I adhere to the religion of art and music and small children.
Rosanne Cash
#86. Is no great with Thee, there is no small, For Thou art all, and fillest all in all.
Elisabeth Elliot
#87. My house, my house, though thou art small, Thou art to me the Escurial.
George Herbert
#88. Always remember that the true meaning of Budo is that soft overcomes hard, small overcomes large.
Mas Oyama
#89. There's a widespread cultural barrenness across art and political culture. But there are some pockets of resistance on the extreme margins, like the techno-savvy protest movements, small press, the creator-owned comics, that seem to be getting some signs of hope for the future.
Alan Moore
#90. Kinkade's paintings are worthless schmaltz, and the lamestream media that love him are wrong. However, I'd love to see a museum mount a small show of Kinkade's work. I would like the art world and the wider world to argue about him in public, out in the open.
Jerry Saltz
#91. The true purpose of illustrated journaling [is] to celebrate your life. No matter how small or mundane or redundant, each drawing and little essay you write to commemorate an event or an object or a place makes it all the more special.
Danny Gregory
#92. In the fabric of space and in the nature of matter, as in a great work of art, there is, written small, the artist's signature.
Carl Sagan
#93. Art is a shadow of what a person is thinking ... a small glimpse of what they hold inside. Little secrets, regrets, joys ... every line has its own meaning.
Sarah
#94. Acting is like any other art form, in that you have the option to go very big or go very small.
Nicolas Cage
#95. The greatest fine art of the future will be the making of a comfortable living from a small piece of land.
Abraham Lincoln
#96. I believe that each work of art, whether it is a work of great genius, or something very small, comes to the artist and says, "Here I am. Enflesh me. Give birth to me."
Madeleine L'Engle
#97. A king-size bed sat catty-corner opposite me. The bedroom was painted white, but the comforter was crimson. Small black velvet bird appliques swarmed in the center. I'm not much for art. I'll confess the deeper meaning of the twisted comforter was lost on me. Maybe death to all swallows?
Hailey Edwards
#98. What I hear every day on talk radio is America's lack of education - and I don't mean lack of college degrees. I mean lack of the basic art of democracy, the ability to seek the great truths that can come only by synthesizing the small truths possessed by each of us.
Donella Meadows
#99. Why shouldn't we, so generally addicted to the gigantic, at last have some small works of art, some short poems, short pieces of music [ ... ], some intimate, low-voiced, and delicate things in our mostly huge and roaring, glaring world?
Elizabeth Bishop
#100. Only by taking infinitesimally small units for observation (the differential of history, that is, the individual tendencies of men) and attaining to the art of integrating them (that is, finding the sum of these infinitesimals) can we hope to arrive at the laws of history.
Leo Tolstoy
