Top 100 Museum Quotes
#1. Life is a passage through a museum of beauty.
Robert Genn
#2. We have a group of friends of the museum who try to raise, if they can, periodically something to help us. Of course, the main thing about a building like this is its upkeep. It needs central heating and it needs central air conditioning.
Katherine Dunham
#3. The Whitney is a museum that has a great rapport with younger artists and the community.
Jeff Koons
#4. I started thinking what could happen with my art and I realized that the biggest thing that could is that it winds up in a museum. It's like finding a rare animal and putting it in the zoo.
Patti Smith
#5. Negatives are the notebooks, the jottings, the false starts, the whims, the poor drafts, and the good draft but never the completed version of the work The print and a proper one is the only completed photograph, whether it is specifically shaded for reproduction, or for a museum wall.
W. Eugene Smith
#6. Also, while I was at Yale, I had a job teaching kids at the museum.
Robert T. Bakker
#7. The Church is not a museum to display perfect people, but a hospital for the hurting.
John Osteen
#8. In Paris, it used to feel like you were living in a museum. As beautiful as it was, it's still limited. But here you have just everything.
Isaac Mizrahi
#9. From the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard came a note from Professor F. W. Putnam, rapturous in his commendation of "your great work.
Timothy Egan
#10. A great day in New York would be to wake up, get a cup of coffee and head up to Central Park for a nice walk. Then I'd go down to the East Village and stroll around. After that, maybe I'd go check out a museum or catch an indie film at the Angelika.
Emmanuelle Chriqui
#11. At 16, I decided to do something brave: I went on a prehistoric dig. In fact, I've had my name in a museum since I was 18 years old, not for my painting but for the prehistoric objects I found. That's how I started thinking about art.
Pierre Soulages
#12. I grew up in New York, and for the first ten years of my life, we lived across from the Metropolitan Museum. When I was an adult, I moved back to that neighborhood and lived there again.
M.J. Rose
#13. Growing up in New York is like living in a horror museum because there are so many strange people walking the streets and riding the subways. You learn to develop a tough front if you live here, just in case you get into any kind of trouble and you need to talk your way out of it.
Christopher Walken
#14. I do not think that a museum needs to engage with pop culture in order to make itself interesting to museumgoers. Museums are already interesting and engaging with pop culture for its own sake is just a quick way to seem and become dated.
John Hodgman
#15. The primary purpose of the Museum is to help people enjoy, understand, and use the visual arts of our time.
Alfred H. Barr Jr.
#16. Puppets are pure form then ideas for performance come out of that. It's always the form and the visuals and that's why I like to make puppets in a gallery or museum. They're not often in those contexts.
Wayne White
#17. Painting is the most magical of mediums. The transcendence is truly amazing to me every time I go to a museum and I see how somebody figured another way to rub colored dirt on a flat surface and make space where there is no space or make you think of a life experience.
Chuck Close
#18. I just get the feeling that if Jesse Helms was in charge of art in America, you'd go into a museum and see nothing but prints of dogs playing cards.
Elayne Boosler
#19. Sometimes Peggy herself would sell tickets to her museum, and if tourists asked her if Mrs. Guggenheim was still alive, she'd assure them she wasn't.
Edmund White
#20. Living is like tearing through a museum. Not until later do you really start absorbing what you saw, thinking about it, looking it up in a book, and remembering - because you can't take it in all at once.
Audrey Hepburn
#21. [There is an] immense advantage to be gained by ample space and appropriate surroundings in aiding the formation of a just idea of the beauty and interest of each specimen... Nothing detracts so much from the enjoyment ... from a visit to a museum as the overcrowding of the specimens exhibited.
William Henry Flower
#22. I've never made the separation between, say, the museum and the hardware store. I mean, I enjoy both of them, and I want to combine the two.
Andy Warhol
#23. They took all the trees and put them in a tree museum.
Joni Mitchell
#24. Because of the long, long history of British shipping, immigration, trade, empire, missionaries, you can have a better shot at telling a worldwide story in the British Museum's collection than any other. Britain has been more connected with the rest of the world than any other country, for longer.
Neil MacGregor
#25. If you want proof of what the country is really all about, just walk through the National September 11 Memorial Museum. Here it is, in the faces of the victims, in the stories of bravery, in the souls and memory of the survivors, the next of kin.
Mike Barnicle
#26. What I hope is I'll eventually be seen as an actual individual, not as some abstraction - an art dealer running a museum.
Jeffrey Deitch
#27. ... walk in the footprints of his ancestors. This land is a museum of man's ancient history. The American has gone to the moon and found dust, he's going farther away to look for other planets, very good. But know thyself first. That is what I would tell my American friend.
Tsegaye Gebre Medhin
#28. We console ourselves with the comfortable fallacy that a single museum piece will do, ignoring the clear dictum of history that a species must be saved in many places if it is to be saved at all.
Aldo Leopold
#29. The biggest looters are the British Museum.
Lowkey
#30. My philosophy is that I'm an artist. I perform an art not with a paint brush or a camera. I perform with bodily movement. Instead of exhibiting my art in a museum or a book or on canvas, I exhibit my art in front of the multitudes.
Steve Prefontaine
#31. I'm from Holland and the history of "Admiral" is something you would read about when you're at school. Nobody knows about these stories and when you go to any museum in Holland, you will see these paintings of these 17th century sea beckels that the Dutch were in to, so it always intrigued me.
Roel Reine
#32. The British Museum was our first real museum, the property of the public rather than the monarch or the church.
Kate Williams
#33. I love museums more than any other institution the human race has invented. Museum people are always overworked and underpaid, and they all deserve sainthood, every one.
Robert T. Bakker
#35. My favorite museums are things like the Frick Museum in New York and the Huntington Hartford in Pasadena where it's someone's home that you walk through.
Larry Ellison
#36. I parked in front of the Field Museum under a NO PARKING sign. There were a couple of actual spots I could have used, but the drive was even closer. Besides, I found it aesthetically satisfying to defy municipal code.
Jim Butcher
#37. The Web meant that I didn't have to schlep a whole bunch of stuff to a museum and fight with all their constraints and make something that, in the end, only 150 people would actually get out to see. Instead, I could put something together in my lab and make it accessible to the world.
Ken Goldberg
#38. I used to wonder: Do only ignorant laypeople gaze on the colossal bust of Ramses II at the British Museum and ask themselves how it ended up there? Is it only the unschooled visitor who looks at the soaring column from the Temple of Artemis at the Met and questions why it exists in this place?
Sharon Waxman
#39. Museum collections have given photography rigor, and mortis.
Bill Jay
#40. As they drove back to Greenpoint from Long Island, Drake looked at the other drivers on the Long Island Expressway and realized that anyone could be anyone's father, that anyone could love anyone under certain circumstances, and that life is a museum of small accidents.
Simon Van Booy
#41. The mind is like a well-endowed museum, only a small fraction of its holdings on view at any one time.
James Richardson
#42. The church is not a museum for pristine saints, but a hospital ward for broken sinners.
Timothy Keller
#43. Music is art to me, and you don't censor art. You don't go into a museum and censor things.
Iggy Azalea
#44. I need my skull in one piece. Crushing it would be like taking a wrecking ball to some secret museum before anyone ever got to see what's inside.
Jandy Nelson
#45. While about one-third of Americans believe in ghosts, you won't find many exhibits on these spooky beings down at the local science museum. Why? Well, one explanation that you might consider, ghosts are just figments of our highly fertile imaginations!
Seth Shostak
#46. I left Kurdistan in April 2003 with the peshmerga, following their excited advance as Saddam's forces crumbled. First Kirkuk, then Mosul - where looters broke into the city museum and seized its Parthian sculptures - then Tikrit. I reported from Baghdad in month-long stints until the end of 2004.
Luke Harding
#47. The modern museum has multiple purposes - to curate and preserve, to research, and to reach out to the public. They challenge us and ask us to question our assumptions about the past or the world around us.
Kate Williams
#48. You don't go missing in a museum- you just get temporarily absorbed by the walls.
Neal Shusterman
#49. Life is your art. An open, aware heart is your camera. A oneness with your world is your film. Your bright eyes and easy smile is your museum.
Ansel Adams
#50. I had a novel in the back of my mind when I won an Ian St James story competition in 1993. At the award ceremony an agent asked me if I was writing a novel. I showed her four or five chapters of what would become 'Behind the Scenes at the Museum' and to my surprise she auctioned them off.
Kate Atkinson
#51. It is, however, not to the museum, or the lecture-room, or the drawing- school, but to the library, that we must go for the completion of our humanity. It is books that bear from age to age the intellectual wealth of the world.
Robert Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Earl Of Lytton
#52. The theater should be free to the people just as the Public Library is free, just as the museum is free ... I want the theater to be made accessible to the people.
Eva Le Gallienne
#53. For many, the icon of the British Museum is the Rosetta Stone, that administrative by-product of the Greek imperial adventure in Africa.
Neil MacGregor
#55. some prominent aviation museums across India including the HAL Museum in Bangalore, the Indian Air Force Museum in Delhi and the Naval Aviation Museum in Goa which are storehouses of information
A. P. J. Abdul Kalam
#56. He couldn't understand at all why he had let himself risk his skin for a dead shriveled-up part-nigger dwarf that had never done anything but get himself embalmed and then lain stinking in a museum the rest of his life.
Flannery O'Connor
#57. The time was when a library was very like a museum and the librarian a mouser among dusty books. The time is when the library is a school and the librarian in the highest sense a teacher.
Melvil Dewey
#58. A painting in a museum hears more ridiculous opinions than anything else in the world.
Edmond De Goncourt
#59. I want to bring back the human encounter into places where material things have a prime status. In a museum, you're supposed to look at things and not talk to other people.
Tino Sehgal
#60. Eco sees the intellectual as an organizer of culture, someone who can run a magazine or a museum. An administrator, in fact. I think this is a melancholy situation for an intellectual.
Antonio Tabucchi
#61. She finds the ribbon she uses as a bookmark, opens the book, and the museum falls away.
Anthony Doerr
#62. I have no connections here; only gusty collisions,
rootless seedlings forced into bloom, that collapse.
...
I am the Visiting Poet: a real unicorn,
a wind-up plush dodo, a wax museum of the Movement.
People want to push the buttons and see me glow.
Marge Piercy
#63. I want to create a space that moves people. It doesn't matter if it is a house, or a museum, or whatever. So, it is somebody sitting on that lawn, just going around and around and feeling really happy. That is something that I'm striving for.
Tadao Ando
#64. [A Buddhist monk on a pilgrimage speaks to a museum curator.]
And I come here alone. For five
seven
eighteen
forty years it was in my mind that the old Law was not well followed; being overlaid, as thou knowest, with devildom, charms, and idolatry ... '
So it comes with all faiths.
Rudyard Kipling
#65. I am reading Ian Rankins book Doors Open and am enjoying his dark Edinburgh narrative will rate soon once I have read it. I am also a fan of Jane Austen and have visited her Museum House in Chawton, Hampshire every year for the last three years. My Favourite book is Sense and Sensibility.
Ian Rankin
#66. You said there's been another murder?"
"At the Dwarf Bread Museum. Someone killed Mr. Hopkinson with his own bread!"
"Made him eat it?"
"Hit him with it, sir," said Carrot reproachfully. "Battle Bread, sir.
Terry Pratchett
#67. People didn't just wear wedding dresses in the past. They also wore plain cotton shifts beneath them. As pretty as the dresses might be, and as lovely as they might look on display, if a museum doesn't hang the shifts beside them or acknowledge that the shifts existed, that exhibit's incomplete.
Susanna Kearsley
#68. Don't go to a museum with a destination. Museums are wormholes to other worlds. There are ecstasy machines. Follow your eyes to wherever they lead you, stop, get very quiet, and the world should begin to change for you. And if you see me, say something! We can talk about it together.
Jerry Saltz
#69. Black people should have recognition for themselves and their backgrounds and their relationships with other people in the world and thus lose some of their alienation. This museum has certainly stood for that in this town.
Katherine Dunham
#70. I believe that when you go into a gallery or a museum, the most powerful pieces are the ones that don't have the words in the corner that distract you from the larger piece.
Maynard James Keenan
#71. I was never surprised that they did not have a phoenix on display. There is only one phoenix at a time, of course, and while the Natural History Museum was filled with dead things, the phoenix is always alive.
Neil Gaiman
#72. We have a hieroglyphical inscription in the British Museum as early as the reign of Sevechus of the eighth century before the Christian era, showing that the doctrine of Trinity in Unity already formed part of their religion and that ... the three gods only made one person.
Samuel Sharpe
#73. Florence Dempsey, played by Torchy Blane actress Glenda Farrell, goes so far as to memorably declare to her friend Charlotte in The Mystery of the Wax Museum, "You raise the kids; I'll raise the roof!
Erika Janik
#74. My husband is the romantic one in our relationship. He's always doing sweet things for me. Each year, we recreate our first date - it was a blind date, and we met at the zoo, followed by a trip to the museum. I'd have to say that's my favorite romantic date.
Lori Wilde
#75. There's a statue of Jimmy Stewart in the Hollywood Wax Museum, and the statue talks better than he does.
Dean Martin
#76. (Rome) is a Metropolitan Museum of Art the size of Manhattan, no roof, no display cases, and half a million combustion engines rumbling in the hallways.
Anthony Doerr
#77. I think everything belongs in a certain place, for kids who feel they don't belong anywhere. A museum is an institution like a library where everything has a place, everything belongs.
Brian Selznick
#78. And exactly how old are you MacRieve ?"
"Twelve hundreds, give or take."
"Great Hekate, you're a relic. Don't you have a museum exhibit to be in somewhere ?
Kresley Cole
#79. When I'm working, on stage, entertaining people, or watching someone do something amazing, it inspires me to be the best artist that I can be. I enjoy being around art - whether it be a museum, a Broadway show - or even writing a poem. Those are things that make me feel alive and inspire me.
Naturi Naughton
#80. Somehow, this was one oddity too many. He could accept "Mind the Gap" and the Earl's Court, and even the strange library. But damn it, like all Londoners, he knew his Tube map, and this was going too far. "There isn't a British Museum Station," said Richard, firmly.
Neil Gaiman
#81. If you don't work yourself up into a fever of greed and covetousness in an art museum, you're just not doing the job.
Thomas Hoving
#82. Source of inspiration. The MAK is a museum that has had a profound effect on me as an artist and art viewer.
Kiki Smith
#83. For 'The Journal of Finn Reardon,' I traveled to New York City and walked the streets where Finn and his friends would have lived, worked, and played. I visited the Tenement Museum on Orchard Street and toured an actual flat in which families like Finn's might have lived.
Susan Campbell Bartoletti
#84. The Western memory museum is now mostly a visual one.
Susan Sontag
#86. On the personal side, family is really important to me. I have a big family - five kids and 12 grandkids - so keeping that going is wonderful. And I do a lot of philanthropy. I'm chairman of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
Charles Schwab
#87. Soaked in pain
my suits remain standing
when I take them off -
hollow men beside the closet,
a museum of days.
Chad Sweeney
#88. If for us culture means museum and library and open house and art gallery, for them it meant the activities and amenities of everyday life ... The rift is ... between "folk" culture, where the unschooled can be wise, and print culture, which enslaved the other senses to the eye.
Nick Joaquin
#89. Marlins Park is what I call my office in Miami, because I work for the Venezuelan Museum of Baseball and Hall of Fame. My job is to go to all the MLB stadiums and to talk to and collect articles from all the Venezuelan players in the big leagues and those Americans that played in Venezuela.
Juan Pablo Galavis
#90. Remember that it's only by going off the track that you get to know the country...And don't, let me beg you, go with that awful tourist idea that Italy's only a museum of antiquities and art. Love and understand the Italians, for the people are more marvelous than the land.
E. M. Forster
#91. For me, to put together my museum and all my remembrances was a big effort mentally, physically and monetarily.
Elsa Peretti
#92. I don't decide where I live. My wife decides. She's a curator of contemporary art, and she works at an art museum, so we go wherever she has a job. All basements look the same, so I can write from whatever basement I happen to be living in.
John Green
#93. Go to the source for ideas, go to the Metropolitan Museum, find your inspiration in nature, go to the Museum of Natural History, but never rely on something that someone else has done.
Van Day Truex
#94. Many people will say, well, clothes should be worn; but I think people can look at them in public, like seeing a film. I think museum exhibitions are very important.
Issey Miyake
#95. I love 'To Kill A Mockingbird' - it seems to offer up new layers every time you read it. I also love Kate Atkinson's 'Behind The Scenes At The Museum' - that's the book that started me writing.
Jojo Moyes
#96. [On the British Museum:] It was manifestly impossible to read all the books in that huge, gloomy structure, but I made a good try and accumulated a fund of useless information guaranteed to cast a pall over any dinner table.
Elsa Maxwell
#97. Man seems to be a rickety poor sort of thing, any way you take him; a kind of British Museum of infirmities and inferiorities. He is always undergoing repairs. A machine that was as unreliable as he is would have no market.
Mark Twain
#98. There are those photographers who have made a whole career doing commercial work but have never had a museum show, and then there are others who've only had museum shows but couldn't survive for five seconds in the real world of photography. But I've done absolutely everything.
Duane Michals
#99. A home is not a museum. It doesn't have to be furnished with Picasso paintings, or Sheraton suites, or Oriental rugs, or Chinese pottery. But it does have to be furnished with things that mean something to you.
James M. Cain
#100. Then, the stunningly white cubes that make up the Getty Museum. It's an architectural masterpiece funded by a venal billionaire's trust, housing third-rate art. Pure L.A.: might makes right and packaging is all. Traffic
Jonathan Kellerman
