Art

"The circus building itself was based on the Greek hippodrome. The circus had seats for spectators around a "u" shaped arena. The racing took place in the arena around a barrier (spina) in the middle, with turning posts (metae) around each end. At one end of the arena were the starting gates. The first circus built in Rome was the Circus Maximus that was constructed during the monarchy. It was built completely from wood. Later it was rebuilt at various times. The final version could seat 250,000 people, it was built of stone and measured 400 m in length and 90 m in width."

"America's first circus building was opened here at 12th and Market Streets, April 3, 1793. On that day the English equestrian John Bill Ricketts gave America's first complete circus performance. President Washington attended this show later that season."

"A parasitic society which, like the urban proletariat in the Rome Empire lives for bread and circuses and turns savage if it is not given to them. Bread and circuses—to some observers, welfare and television seemed modern equivalents, pacifiers protectors of power and privilege."

"Clowns are the pegs on which the circus is hung."

"The way to go to the circus, however, is with someone who has seen perhaps one theatrical performance before in his life and that in the High School hall...The scales of sophistication are struck from your eyes and you see in the circus a gathering of men and women who are able to do things as a matter of course which you couldn’t do if your life depended on it."

"Circus, n. A place where horses,ponies and elephants are permitted to see men, women and children acting the fool."

"I remember in the circus learning that the clown was the prince, the high prince. I always thought that the high prince was the lion or the magician, but the clown is the most important."

"Take a look at those clowns And the tricks that they play In the circus of life Life is bitter and gay:There are clowns in the night Clowns everywhere See how they run Run from despair"

"If we wanted applause, we would have joined the circus."

"The American circus has a unique and often overlooked importance in American history. The first American circuses began shortly after the country was founded, and as the country’s population grew, moved West, went through the Industrial Revolution, and opened its gates to the world, the circus followed. Indeed, in many cases the circus provided people’s first view of new inventions, exotic animals and peoples, and popular entertainments. The history of the circus is in many ways a microcosm of the history of America."

"Philip Astley was a horseman with a British dragoon regiment from about 1759 and at first was the sole performer in the Amphitheatre, specializing in riding with one foot on the saddle and one on the horse’s head while brandishing a sword. He gradually included other equestrians, acrobats, rope dancers, aerialists, clowns, and the first recorded circus freak show."

"A portrait miniature is a miniature portrait painting, usually executed in gouache, water colour, or enamel. Portrait miniatures developed out of the techniques of the miniatures in illuminated manuscripts, and were popular among 16th-century elites, mainly in England and France, and spread across the rest of Europe from the middle of the 18th-century, remaining highly popular until the development of daguerreo types and photography in the mid-19th century. They were especially valuable in introducing people to each other over distances; a nobleman proposing the marriage of his daughter might send a courier with her portrait to visit potential suitors. Soldiers and sailors might carry miniatures of their loved ones while traveling, or a wife might keep one of her husband while he was away. The first miniaturists used water colour to paint on stretched vellum. During the second half of the 17th century, vitreous enamel painted on copper became increasingly popular, especially in France. In the 18th century, miniatures were painted with water colour on ivory, which had now become relatively cheap. As small in size as 40 mm × 30 mm, portrait miniatures were often used as personal w:Mementosmementos or as jewellery or snuff box covers."

"These are the visionary, mystical moments, when a man 'completes his partial mind'. His everyday conscious self is only a small part of the mind, like the final crescent of the moon. In moments of crisis, the full moon suddenly appears."

"And what you did was, you take the staff to a special room in Tanis, a map room with a miniature of the city all laid out on the floor, and if you put the staff in a certain place, at a certain time of day, the sun shone through here — and made a beam that came down on the floor here. And gave you the exact location of the Well of Souls."

"The ornamental borders framing the miniature paintings seem to be inspired by the decorative designs on the Mughal carpets."

"In western India, Jainism, an Indian religion which expounded renunciation and asceticism, gave rise to unique miniatures which flowered into the school of Rajasthani painting. The miniature paintings commenced with the patronage of the Jain merchants of Gujarat in the fourteenth century. The painting they commissioned were of illustrations of Jain Royalty and deities which were painted on dried palm leaves and bound in wooden covers...when paper was introduced in the last quarter of the fourteenth century, as somewhat large format became available...They were part of the illustrated texts which were preserved in temple libraries. The illustrated text inspired much of the later Hindu miniature paintings."

"The themes of Mithuna and Maithuna continued in paintings created during the Mughal and British rules (15-19th CE), mainly in Rajasthan and Himachal Pradesh. The erotic themes of the Hindu miniature paintings represented loves of divine couples."

"In such miniature paintings the theme of lyric poetry was depicted with strong confident lines, throbbing colours, and bold patterns, but controlled workmanship. The lively landscape created a standard for these outstanding illustrations."

"Artifacts of our oldest cultures give evidence that the human race has always made things in miniature. The early American Indians made ...dolls, toys, and miniature implements for their children. Toys have been found in Egyptian tombs as well as in archaeological digs of ancient China. The fascination for things in miniature is still strong for most people today."

"Mushrooms are miniature pharmaceutical factories, and of the thousands of mushroom species in nature, our ancestors and modern scientists have identified several dozen that have a unique combination of talents that improve our health."

"Survival kit contents check. In them you'll find: one forty-five caliber automatic; two boxes of ammunition; four days' concentrated emergency rations; one drug issue containing antibiotics, morphine, vitamin pills, pep pills, sleeping pills, tranquilizer pills; one miniature combination Russian phrase book and Bible; one hundred dollars in rubles; one hundred dollars in gold; nine packs of chewing gum; one issue of prophylactics; three lipsticks; three pair of nylon stockings. Shoot, a fella' could have a pretty good time."

"Dr. Strangelove in: Quotes for Maj. T.J. 'King' Kong (Character) in Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb , IMDb,"

"The first of the “request” prayers in the daily Amidah is a fractal. It replicates in miniature the structure of the Amidah as a whole (Praise-Request-Thanks)."

"I've never seen anywhere in the world as beautiful as Kashmir. It has something to do with the fact that the valley is very small and the mountains are very big, so you have this miniature countryside surrounded by the Himalayas, and it's just spectacular. And it's true, the people are very beautiful too."

"I have sought it, finally, because in the union of love I have seen, in a mystic miniature, the prefiguring vision of the heaven that saints and poets have imagined. This is what I sought, and though it might seem too good for human life, this is - at last what – I have found."

"The copper patina-clad statue, dedicated on October 28, 1886, commemorates the centennial of the United States and is a gesture of friendship from France to America. Frederic Auguste Bartholdi sculpted the statue and obtained a U.S. patent useful for raising construction funds through the sale of miniatures."

"We had a large old-fashioned battery, a wet cell, in the kitchen, hooked up to an electric bell. The bell was too complicated to understand at first, and the battery, to my mind, was more immediately attractive, for it contained an earthenware tube with a massive, gleaming copper cylinder in the middle, immersed in a bluish liquid, all this inside an outer glass casing, also filled with fluid, and containing a slimmer bar of zinc. It looked like a miniature chemical factory of sorts, and I thought I saw little bubbles of gas, at times, coming off the zinc. The Daniell cell (as it was called) had a thoroughly nineteenth-century, Victorian look about it, and this extraordinary object was making electricity all by itself—not by rubbing or friction, but just by the virtue of its own chemical reactions."

"Rance: A search party must be organized. What have you in the way of dogs? Prentice: A spaniel and a miniature poodle. Rance: Let them be unleashed!"

"One man is equivalent to all Creation. One man is a World in miniature."

"He could, though, just make out a miniature replica of Cori Celesti, upon whose utter peak the world’s quarrelsome and somewhat bourgeois gods lived in palace of marble, alabaster and uncut moquette three-piece suits they had chosen to call Dunmanifestin."

"The true Poet is all-knowing; he is an actual world in miniature."

"India has been a cauldron of dreams, ideas and aspirations of the humankind and this is a distinctive character of India, and Indian in that sense represents the world in miniature. If a system can succeed in India, it will indicate the possibility of success in the world as a whole."

"It might help if you imagine an inner living dimension within yourself in which you create, in miniature psychic form, all the exterior conditions that you know. Simply put, you do exactly this. Your thoughts, feelings and mental pictures can be called incipient exterior events, for in one way or another each of these is materialized into physical reality."

"Plant lovers looking for new and exciting kinds to grow, orchid growers seeking more variety, will find unending fascination and beauty in miniature orchids. It has been proven that orchids can be grown on windowsills and under lights as well as in green houses. Miniature orchids – those ranging in height from ½ inch to 6 inches offer everything that the larger one do."

"By the beginning of the twentieth century, flowers, faces and miniature landscapes began to appear beside patterns of pointed stars, and to this day annual contests reward the most creative artists in this tradition."

"Demons aren't bound by physics. If you take the long view, the universe is just something small and round, like those water filled balls which produce a miniature snowstorm when you shake them."

"While I pride myself on trying to be creative in all areas of my life, I have occasionally gone overboard, like the time I decided to bring to a party a salad that I constructed, on a huge rattan platter, to look like a miniature scale model of the Gardens of Babylon."

"...the theological standpoint on which Luther based his intervention, and it shows in miniature the rich Augustinian spirituality of penance and the progress that he had forged in his early works."

"Sixtenth century represents the zenith of Ottoman miniature painting. During this time, the influences of the late 15th and early 16th centuries—the encounters with western European portraiture, the growing emphasis on historiographical painting, the impact of ;nautical cartography, and the enduring influence of the Persian legacy – began to crystallize into distinctly Ottoman styles and genres."

"The whole life of the empire went back to the senate — later to the Caesar, the all-powerful, omniscient god of the empire. Every province, every district had its capital in miniature, its small portion of Roman sovereignty to govern every aspect ..."

"Ottoman miniature painting gave up the warmth, the whimsy, the theatricality, and the multiple meanings of Iranian art in favor of realism, which was also expressed in Ottoman maps, fortress plans and geographies."

"The more intensively the family has stamped its character upon the child, the more it will tend to feel and see its earlier miniature world again in the bigger world of adult life. Naturally, this is not a conscious, intellectual process."

"The great composers of the Romantic period all wrote works that we today call "miniatures." They are not large-scale works like concertos, sonatas, etc. but rather small, self-contained works that usually stick to one or two sentiments. Some famous examples are Mendelssohn's Lieder ohne Worte ("Songs without words"), which are the length of a short song and organized accordingly, yet are for solo piano. Schubert chose to call some of his piano miniatures Moments musicaux ("Musical moments"), which designates them as short works. Chopin had his preludes; Brahms called many of his works in this genre "Intermezzo," a word that means something in-between. Like Chopin's preludes, they really stand alone, or in a set of similarly-titled pieces."

"ONCE when the snow of the year was beginning to fall, We stopped by a mountain pasture to say, “Whose colt?” A little Morgan had one forefoot on the wall, The other curled at his breast. He dipped his head And snorted to us. And then we saw him bolt. We heard the miniature thunder where he fled, And we saw him, or thought we saw him, dim and gray, Like a shadow across instead of behind the flakes. The little fellow’s afraid of the falling snow. He never saw it before. It isn’t play With the little fellow at all. He’s running away. He wouldn’t believe when his mother told him,..."

"Think of the Queen Mary— the whole ship goes by and then comes the rudder. And there's a tiny thing at the edge of the rudder called a trimtab. It's a miniature rudder. Just moving the little trim tab builds a low pressure that pulls the rudder around. Takes almost no effort at all. So I said that the little individual can be a trimtab. Society thinks it's going right by you, that it's left you altogether. But if you're doing dynamic things mentally, the fact is that you can just put your foot out like that and the whole big ship of state is going to go. So I said, call me Trimtab."

"It [smart contact lens] is likely to spur a range of other innovations towards miniaturizing technology and using it in wearable devices to help people monitor."

"Since earliest times men have loved to make small likenesses of themselves and of their animals. The ancient Greeks kept images of the gods in their houses to watch over the inmates; they place statutes in graves to please the dead, and they offered others to the nymphs of a spring so that water might flow fresh in the fountain. Such ideas lingered long and sustained a craft that gradually turned from religious to artistic pre-occupations and from the production of primitive images to true miniature sculpture."

"It is relatively simple to set up a fantasy campaign, and better still, it will cost almost nothing. In fact you will not even need miniature figures, although their occasional employment is recommended for real spectacle when battles are fought."

"The tree was evidently aged, from the size of its stem. It was about six feet high, the branches came out from the stem in a regular and symmetrical manner, and it had all the appearance of a tree in miniature."

"Thinking is an experimental dealing with small quantities of energy, just as a general moves miniature figures over a map before setting his troops in action."