Top 100 Museum Quotes
#1. You know, sometimes I envy you. It must be nice to be a wolf. Just for a while." "It has its drawbacks." Like fleas, she thought, as they locked up the museum. And the food. And the constant nagging feeling that you should be wearing three bras at once.
Terry Pratchett
#2. You should definitely visit the Louvre, a world-famous art museum where you can view, at close range, the backs of thousands of other tourists trying to see the Mona Lisa.
Dave Barry
#3. I can't stand these damn shows on museum walls with neat little frames, where you look at the images as if they were pieces of art. I want them to be pieces of life!
W. Eugene Smith
#4. I don't know a single collector or museum director who says: 'Oh, he's on a list, so I think I'll buy something of his.' The people who buy my art put a little more thought into it than that.
Olafur Eliasson
#5. We sit inert, like dead specimens of some museum, while lessons are pelted at us from on high, like hailstones on flowers.
Rabindranath Tagore
#6. I am for an art that is political-erotical-mystical, that does something more than sit on its ass in a museum.
Claes Oldenburg
#7. The fact that the work is affirmed by the Museum of Contemporary Art I think sends continued signals that this is worth paying attention to, looking at, and understanding.
Theaster Gates
#8. and Derry (give me a minute, give me a minute), but there's not much to compare with the British Museum,
Anonymous
#9. I've never seen a postcard of my work in a museum.
Wade Guyton
#10. You want to know how I think art should be taught to children? Take them to a museum and say, 'This is art, and you can't do it.
Steve Martin
#11. I am making a collection of the things my opponents have found me to be and, when this election is over, I am going to open a museum and put them on display.
Lyndon B. Johnson
#12. If you had a large vase with a big crack down the middle of it, a Japanese art museum would put the vase on a pedestal and shine a spotlight on the crack!
Arielle Ford
#13. I think that still, for the most part, even in 2010, the vast majority of museum shows and gallery shows and gallerists are pretty much dominated by men. So having a sense of what women are up to, for me, frankly, is very, very important.
Carrie Mae Weems
#14. I can pick out people in this city to follow. I can be in a show at the Museum of Modern Art, my space in the Museum of Modern Art is my mailbox, my mail is delivered there. Whenever I want mail, I have to go through this city to get my mail.
Vito Acconci
#15. The distinction between a gallery and a museum is enormous. The gallery is about looking at a thing of beauty; the purpose of the activity is an aesthetic response. The museum is actually about the object that lets you get into somebody else's life.
Neil MacGregor
#16. What you see at the Field Museum is only like, 10 percent of the collection. It's birds of paradise and passenger pigeons and in all these drawers that pull out, these specimens come out and it's spectacular. And it worked out.
Andrew Bird
#17. SMALL BOY: Where do animals go when they die? SMALL GIRL: All good animals go to heaven, but the bad ones go to the Natural History Museum. - Caption to a drawing by E.H. Shepard, PUNCH, 1929 SIMON
Sarah R. Shaber
#18. The quality of the Neues Museum's construction is extraordinary even by German standards, and people can smell that quality. The concept would not have been so convincing without it.
David Chipperfield
#19. What I like so much about Corot is that he can say everything with a bit of tree; and it was Corot himself that I found in the museum of Naples - in the simplicity of the work of Pompeii and the Egyptians. These priestesses in their silver-grey tunics are just like Corot's nymphs.
Pierre-Auguste Renoir
#20. Maybe the museum [of Arts and Design ]needs to follow the advice of its acronym and not be afraid to go a little M.A.D.
Jerry Saltz
#21. The Philadelphia Museum of Art is a house of artistic and intellectual prostitution
Albert C. Barnes
#22. Ancient Mystical Order Rosae Crucis (AMORC), whose Egyptian museum in San Jose took up an entire city block. It stressed the virtues of reason and science while also suggesting that ancient Egyptian wisdom would allow its followers to re-lease the hidden powers inherent in man.
George Pendle
#23. Boston: Clear out eight hundred thousand people and preserve it as a museum piece. New York: Prison towers and modern posters for soap and whiskey. Pittsburgh: Abandon it.
Frank Lloyd Wright
#24. If every museum in the New World were emptied, if every famous building in the Old World were destroyed and only Venice saved, there would be enough there to fill a full lifetime with delight. Venice, with all its complexity and variety, is in itself the greatest surviving work of art in the world.
Evelyn Waugh
#25. A walk through the storage facility of the community museum where I worked might easily have convinced you that people in the past wore only wedding dresses, carried silver candlesticks, and played with porcelain dolls.
Susanna Kearsley
#26. In another place was a vast array of idols - Polynesian, Mexican, Grecian, Phoenician, every country on earth I should think. And here, yielding to an irresistible impulse, I wrote my name upon the nose of a steatite monster from South America that particularly took my fancy.
H.G.Wells
#27. A museum is not a first-hand contact: it is an illustrated lecture. And what one wants is the actual vital touch.
D.H. Lawrence
#28. Surely nothing has to listen to so many stupid remarks as a painting in a museum.
Edmond De Goncourt
#29. Sometimes I feel like a caretaker of a museum
a huge, empty museum where no one ever comes, and I'm watching over it for no one but myself.
Haruki Murakami
#30. My parents have always given me whatever I wanted. Took me to the ballet, the opera, museum exhibitions. I was always surrounded by art. It's their fault I've become an actress.
Bar Paly
#31. A fat old man has disturbed my day, coming to tell me that he has sold my childhood to a museum in Cincinnati.
A.M. Homes
#32. One must picture everything in the world as an enigma, and live in the world as if in a vast museum of strangeness.
Giorgio De Chirico
#33. I have long accepted that an art fair is not a perfectly curated museum show. Instead, it's more like a brightly lit bazaar, where art is haggled over and handled like any other commodity.
Elisabeth Von Thurn Und Taxis
#34. The only slight disconcertance being that in the middle of looking at a paintings [in the Museum of Modern Art] she always found herself desperately needing to take a pee. And grandmother's voice in her ear.
'My dear, if you really have to, only clean, very clean rest rooms will do.
J.P. Donleavy
#35. I long ago ran out of bookshelf space and so, like a museum with its art, simply rotate my books from the boxes to the shelves and back again.
Michael Dirda
#36. Every year, Bailey, Angie, and Mike head to Philadelphia for the Fourth of July. They visit the Museum of Art, and Mike carries Bailey up those 72 steps and they do the Rocky reenactment. Angie helps Bailey raise his arms and they all yell, 'one more year!' Bailey loves Rocky. Does that suprise you?
Amy Harmon
#37. I was living in Paris, which is a very beautiful, very wonderful place, but a tight place as a city, a tight place culturally. Its people are very brilliant, thoughtful, the place functions, but it's a historical place in some ways, like a big museum.
Nicolas Berggruen
#38. I have never been to a museum in Hong Kong, or a movie or a play. I've never gone club-hopping. I've never taken the tram to Victoria Peak.
P. J. O'Rourke
#39. I mix everything up. A museum curator once said to me that there is a great jazz component to the way I do things because good jazz is improvisation and draws elements from all different cultures. And that's the way I do everything - the way I dress and decorate.
Iris Apfel
#40. The true collector's only home is his own museum.
Orhan Pamuk
#41. I guess it started in London, the night our dad blew up the British museum.
Rick Riordan
#42. The reason these paintings are destined for New York is not because I am disappointed about a lack of German interest, but because MoMA asked me, and because I consider it to be the best museum in the world.
Gerhard Richter
#43. I wore white gloves. I lived with my mother & father. I was not a child. I was 37 years old. My bottom lip was swollen. I wore white gloves though I was not a servent. I did not play in a brass band. I was not a waiter. I was not a magician. I was the attendant of a museum.
Edward Carey
#44. she feels still that grasp upon her ankle as if it were a circlet of iron: the embodiment of matrimony. She would be pinned, like the museum butterflies. He would remain free to flutter.
Emmanuelle De Maupassant
#45. In fact, overwhelmingly museum displays are artificial.
Bill Bryson
#46. Real museums are places where Time is transformed into Space.
Orhan Pamuk
#47. The 'Robben Island Bible' has arrived at the British Museum. It's a garish thing, its cover plastered with pink and gold Hindu images, designed to hide its contents. Within is the finest collection of words generated by human intelligence: the complete works of William Shakespeare.
Daniel Hannan
#48. If the Bible is correct, and the Earth is only 6,000 years old, that means there were no dinosaurs, and museum curators have been messing with us. Or the dinosaurs were here, and we never noticed them. Or a lot of people saw them but didn't want to say anything.
Ron Shock
#49. It could be seen as narcissistic to have your own museum, but for me, it's such a long time ago - I have perspective. That young man in the funny clothes - he's almost a stranger, so I can tell his story.
Bjorn Ulvaeus
#50. I like rap music. But bragging about being rich to poor people is really offensive. I want to hear a rap song about buying a Cy Twombly painting or dating a museum curator. I want to hear about that kind of rich.
John Waters
#51. I first saw 'The Dinner Party' in 2007 at the Brooklyn Museum in New York City. While perusing the Heritage Panels, which honor 999 women who have made important contributions to Western history, I came upon the names of two sisters, Sarah and Angelina Grimke.
Sue Monk Kidd
#52. In the last eight weeks I had experienced two of the three best times of my adult life, assuming all visits to the Museum of Natural History were treated as one event. They had both been with Rosie. Was there a correlation? It was critical to find out.
Graeme Simsion
#53. I never thought that the music called "jazz" was ever meant to reach just a small group of people, or become a museum thing locked under glass like all the other dead things that were once considered artistic.
Miles Davis
#54. I went to the beach a couple of times in New York City. Tough summer out there, but I was pretty excited. I found what I thought at the time was a very rare seashell. And I took it to a friend of mine who works in a museum. And I was really disappointed. It turned out to be just a human ear.
David Letterman
#55. Many of the museum directors who make an impact personally curate exhibitions.
Jeffrey Deitch
#56. I went to my first dinosaur hall with my father and twin brother. We went to the American Museum of Natural History, and I was blown away by the dinosaurs.
David H. Koch
#57. We Brits print banknotes out in Debden in Essex, and have contracted it out to the private sector. Here in the U.S. it is a government operation right in the heart of Washington next door to the Holocaust Museum.
Evan Davis
#58. I'm sure there was an educational angle to the trips (I think one was to the Ulster Museum) but it was the fun and banter I had with my friends I remember the most.
Rory McIlroy
#59. The whole room was like a museum of how people lived in olden times.
Patrick Ness
#60. A collection that embraces the whole world allows you to consider the whole world. That is what an institution such as the British Museum is for.
Neil MacGregor
#61. Later ... the sports jacket became a kind of signature uniform for the museum scientist, complete with leather elbow patches. It indicated an endearing otherworldliness. Too much smartness might betray the wrong priorities, and an inadequate grasp of carabids.
Richard Fortey
#62. Art is original. Marcel Duchamp was an artist when he pioneered Dadaism and installed a urinal in a museum.
The second person to install a urinal wasn't an artist, he was a plumber.
Seth Godin
#63. I think the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, first of all, has got to be put into the context of being an American cultural showcase. It's there to be a museum showcase of all that's great about American music.
Ian Anderson
#64. Is something art just because a museum hangs it on their wall? Are you networking just because you're standing in a crowded room?
Jarod Kintz
#65. At the Museum of Roman Art, the logic of the forms is very much modern. But in spite of that, the idea of the construction could be related to a historical time.
Rafael Moneo
#66. Mitt Romney announced he will fight former heavyweight champion Evander Holyfield in a charity boxing match. You can tell that Romney is serious about it. Today, his butler gave him a piggyback ride up the steps of the Philadelphia art museum.
Jimmy Fallon
#67. We are very slow to recognise in the peculiar physiognomy of a new writer the model which is labelled "great talent" in our museum of general ideas.
Marcel Proust
#68. I was just down in Dallas, Texas ... the Assassination Museum ... it's really accurate, you know, 'cause Oswald's not in it.
Bill Hicks
#69. That's partly the success of my work-the ability to have a young black girl walk into the Brooklyn Museum and see paintings she recognizes not because of their art or historical influence but because of their inflection, in terms of colors, their specificity and presence.
Kehinde Wiley
#70. I'll be giving a speech at the randomest place, like a bank or something, and a guy in a suit will say, 'I'm totally freaked out that I'm talking to the girl from 'Cremaster.' For the rest of my life, that movie will be playing in a museum somewhere. I never could have expected that huge response.
Aimee Mullins
#71. Mission accomplished. The Museum of Modern Art's wide-open, tall-ceilinged, super-reinforced second floor was for all intents and purposes built to accommodate monumental installations and gigantic sculptures, should the need arise. It has arisen.
Jerry Saltz
#72. The role of a museum of modern art is to make a good selection and identify what we believe to be the coming movements, and that requires taste.
David Rockefeller
#73. When a man wants to write a book full of unassailable facts, he always goes to the British Museum.
Anthony Trollope
#74. To look at and properly appreciate the British Museum is the work of a lifetime.
M. E. W. Sherwood
#75. Museum's Grand Gallery. He lunged for the nearest painting he could see, a Caravaggio. Grabbing
Dan Brown
#76. The current demoralization of the art world is attributable at least in part to museum interference, ideological and practical, with ongoing creation in art.
Harold Rosenberg
#77. PREHISTORIC, adj. Belonging to an early period and a museum. Antedating the art and practice of perpetuating falsehood.
Ambrose Bierce
#78. 'Snow' is my most popular book in the United States. But in Turkey, it was not as popular as 'My Name is Red,' or even 'The Museum of Innocence,' because the secular leaders didn't want this bourgeois Orhan trying to understand these head-scarf girls.
Orhan Pamuk
#79. The gods are made of marble
Deep inside a museum
A quadruped monster beckons me to approach
("Outcries")
Helene Baronne D'Oettingen
#81. The man in the shop peered disapprovingly at Evie through the glass. She pumped her arms and legs up and down in imitation of a marching band, gave the man a salute, and continued her meandering walk to the museum.
Libba Bray
#82. DEI without Dale Earnhardt Jr. is a museum.
Tony Stewart
#83. Your museum of pain. Your sanctuary of justifiable indignation.
Wally Lamb
#84. If people don't like Marxism, they should blame the British Museum.
Mikhail Gorbachev
#85. Celtic music is part of the language in Scotland and Ireland, where every kid and grandparent knows those songs, music by the likes of Woody Guthrie and Hank Snow is getting entrenched here. They are part of our cultural language. It's part of a living treasure. It doesn't just belong to a museum.
Rosanne Cash
#86. Uncritical semantics is the myth of a museum in which the exhibits are meanings and the words are labels. To switch languages is to change the labels.
Willard Van Orman Quine
#87. I was a terrible history student. They taught me history as if it were a visit to a wax museum or to the land of the dead. I was over twenty before I discovered that the past was neither quiet nor mute.
Eduardo Galeano
#88. I saw Joseph Cornell's lyrical work for the first time at the Museum of Modern Art in the late seventies and have internalized many of his boxes.
Siri Hustvedt
#89. These are the people who are going to see the pictures in my museum.
Norton Simon
#90. My novel is about the history of the world, told from the point of view of a column of stone.
(from "Wherein We Enter the Museum")
Kit Reed
#91. D. J. Tanner called and she wants her wardrobe back so it can be included in a museum retrospective about the prime years of Full House.
Lena Dunham
#92. Once they're both gone, your parents' house instantly turns into a museum.
Christopher Buckley
#93. Reality TV to me is the museum of social decay.
Gary Oldman
#94. Republicans have called for a National African-American Museum. The plan is being held up by finding a location that isn't in their neighborhood.
Conan O'Brien
#95. The acquisition of culture requires repose, sitting quietly in a room with a book, or alone with one's thoughts even any crowded concert or art museum.
Joseph Epstein
#97. One portion of the lakefront, named Burnham Park in his honor, contains Soldier Field and the Field Museum, which he designed.
Erik Larson
#98. I almost feel like if I didn't have the gallery and museum content it would be easy to get lost. People's attention spans are so short; they see something and it trends for a few days and then it goes away and something else comes.
Kalup Linzy
#99. I have a passion for modern and contemporary art. I spend a lot of time in museums; I particularly like the Guggenheim, MoMA in New York or LACMA and the Getty Museum in Los Angeles, for example. I cannot wait for the Louis Vuitton Foundation to open.
Delphine Arnault
#100. Even when I was a little girl, I remember going to the Museum of Modern Art. I think my parents took me there once or twice. And what I really remember is the design collection.
Barbara Kruger
