Top 100 Quotes About Museums
#1. What I think museums do very well is that they say to a public, "We have some stuff that's worth looking at."
Theaster Gates
#2. I enjoy living life and I enjoy going to different restaurants and eating my way through a country and going to different museums and learning about different cultures.
Mila Kunis
#3. Leave Ueno Station through the park entrance, go past the concert hall and museums, skirt around the fountain, and you come to a sort of tree garden. Homeless people live here, in tents made of sky-blue plastic sheeting and wooden poles. The best tents even have doors.
David Mitchell
#4. 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
#5. 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
#6. We sit inert, like dead specimens of some museum, while lessons are pelted at us from on high, like hailstones on flowers.
Rabindranath Tagore
#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. I've never seen a postcard of my work in a museum.
Wade Guyton
#9. And "Immortality"
mildews ...
in the museums of the moon
Mina Loy
#10. The whole scene made Dan think of American history tests, which were almost as scary as exploding museums.
Rick Riordan
#11. 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
#12. I love museums, but I always thought there was something funny about a group of strangers silently staring at works of inanimate objects together. Each person is having a very personal and maybe even emotional experience, but it's in the confines of an extremely quiet and sterile room.
Hiro Murai
#13. A society - any society - is defined as a set of mutual benefits and duties embodied most visibly in public institutions: public schools, public libraries, public transportation, public hospitals, public parks, public museums, public recreation, public universities, and so on.
Robert Reich
#14. 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
#15. Museums should be places where you raise questions, not just show stuff.
William Thorsell
#16. 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
#17. Apparently Lord Wyndham did regularly donate books to various museums around London. They were usually ones which he had collected earlier, but which were no longer of interest to him or his associates. Irene twitched at the very notion. Give books away? How very frivolous, she finally said.
Genevieve Cogman
#18. 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
#20. The Philadelphia Museum of Art is a house of artistic and intellectual prostitution
Albert C. Barnes
#21. I love to play. I love, opera, hiking and museums. The one thing I don't do is sit. I have a tremendous amount of energy.
Alan Dershowitz
#22. Designers shouldn't design for museums any more than mummies should die for them.
Ralph Caplan
#23. Gather knowledge ... Visit galleries, museums, art and craft fairs ... Read books and magazines. Take workshops. Use your senses. Experience stimulates your memory and imagination.
Nita Leland
#24. I'm going to start these art museums that are basically converted homes, and I have one for modern art, and I have one for 19th century European art, and one for French impressionism. I've got Japanese.
Larry Ellison
#26. It is in the oral traditions of the villages that the arts of India are really alive. The brief Western immortality of museums is pointless to people who have seen eternity in their earth.
Santha Rama Rau
#27. 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
#28. Erudite and entertaining, Max Anderson is the perfect tour guide to the world of art. The Quality Instinct is both educational and enlightening from start to finish, the thinking person's guide to museums. This is a must-read for anyone who wants to truly understand what makes a masterpiece.
Daniel Silva
#29. There is a very vibrant cultural scene in Stockholm. There are lots of places where there are concerts, and there are loads of museums and theaters.
Bjorn Ulvaeus
#30. 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
#31. Most museums - with all their burdens to pay for exhibitions, administration, and security - really don't have any money really to acquire art, with few exceptions.
Eli Broad
#32. Surely nothing has to listen to so many stupid remarks as a painting in a museum.
Edmond De Goncourt
#33. The empty, the angry, the lonely, the tricked, we are all museums of fear.
Charles Bukowski
#34. One day our grandchildren will go to museums to see what poverty was like.
Muhammad Yunus
#35. Museums collect what's important in their respective countries. In Berlin's National Gallery, however, this isn't the case. They're interested neither in me nor the other usual suspects. It's simply a German reality.
Georg Baselitz
#36. I'm not sure what [my latest works are] about but I'm convinced they're the best things I've done and I'm going to the world's best museums with them.
Mark Kostabi
#37. 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
#38. I'm a closet nerd. I love to study history and visit museums.
Shakira
#39. I felt I had to share Idaho with my friend from New York because he'd shared New York with me, so I was going to share the beauty of nature with a man who went to museums and clubs late at night. But there was nothing to do where I lived at night.
Mariel Hemingway
#40. If you're middle aged ... where're you going to go to meet someone? You're not going to go to a bar, you're not going to go to a night club; and there are the museums.
Elizabeth Perkins
#41. They have our bundles split open in museums / our dresses & shirts at auctions / our languages on tape / our stories in locked rare book libraries / our dances on film / The only part of us they can't steal / is what we know.
Chrystos
#42. As far as I can tell the only thing worth looking at in most museums of art is all the schoolgirls on daytrips with the art departments.
Banksy
#43. I don't want to sound pretentious, but I love art, I like to go to museums, and I like to read books.
Rainn Wilson
#44. 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
#45. There's so much that I like about Pittsburgh, actually. The cultural district and museums are wonderful, and I encourage everyone to check them out. And the food is excellent, too!
Troy Polamalu
#46. Art is not an investment. Art is something you buy because you are financially solvent enough to give yourself a pleasure of living with great works rather than having to just see them in museums. People who are buying art at the top of the market as an investment are foolish.
Arne Glimcher
#47. Real museums are places where Time is transformed into Space.
Orhan Pamuk
#48. Of course art world ethics are important. But museums are no purer than any other institution or business. Academics aren't necessarily more high-minded than gallerists.
Jerry Saltz
#49. 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
#50. 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
#51. People have experiences in art museums today that they used to have in church.
Bill Viola
#52. Microsoft has had clear competitors in the past. It's a good thing we have museums to document that.
Bill Gates
#53. Cincinnatians support a symphony, an opera, a ballet, museums, many galleries and theater groups.
Bill Dedman
#54. A day will come when a cannon will be exhibited in museums, just as instruments of torture are now, and the people will be astonished that such a thing could have been.
Victor Hugo
#55. When you think about it, department stores are kind of like museums.
Andy Warhol
#56. I came to Berlin not to visit its museums and galleries, its operas, its theaters ... but for the sake of seeing and speaking with the world's greatest living man - Alexander von Humboldt.
Bayard Taylor
#57. My advice to photographers is to get out there in the field and take photographs but also if they are students to finish their course, learn as many languages as possible, go to movies, read books visit museums, broaden your mind.
Martine Franck
#58. Some government expenditure actually makes a profit. Our theatre leads the world. Loads of tourists must be attracted by the fact that you could spend a week in London doing nothing but visit superb museums and galleries, free.
Simon Hoggart
#59. The murals in restaurants are on par with the food in museums.
Peter De Vries
#60. 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
#61. Museums matter only to the extent that they are perceived to provide communities they serve with something of value beyond their mere existence." - STEPHEN WEIL
G. Wayne Clough
#62. There are wonderful museums with lots of photographs of 1920's musicals.
Julie Harris
#63. I was just down in Dallas, Texas ... the Assassination Museum ... it's really accurate, you know, 'cause Oswald's not in it.
Bill Hicks
#64. Art is, nowadays, our new religion and museums are our cathedrals.
Theodore Zeldin
#65. To look at and properly appreciate the British Museum is the work of a lifetime.
M. E. W. Sherwood
#66. All too often, schools resemble museums, reflecting the past rather than shaping the future
Max Tegmark
#67. Morris Berman has pointed out that museums characteristically present hard things, such as axes and spears, as evidence of early culture. But culture very likely begins with baskets made of reeds that are "soft" and hold emptiness.
Robert Bly
#68. People think it's strange how briskly I move through museums. Sure, I could stand in front of each piece and stare at it for a good long time. But that's not me.
Eli Broad
#70. 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
#71. PREHISTORIC, adj. Belonging to an early period and a museum. Antedating the art and practice of perpetuating falsehood.
Ambrose Bierce
#72. The gods are made of marble
Deep inside a museum
A quadruped monster beckons me to approach
("Outcries")
Helene Baronne D'Oettingen
#73. I write in coffee shops, libraries, parks, museums. I get antsy and then get on my bike and go someplace else, letting the ideas spin around in my head as I dodge taxis.
Phil Klay
#74. Steakhouses sort of have this old-school nature to them; they're like museums full of good food. It's fun hearing the waiter share his expertise on the different cuts of beef and how they're going to cut up your baked potato.
Jim Gaffigan
#75. DEI without Dale Earnhardt Jr. is a museum.
Tony Stewart
#76. I absorbed as many Impressionist paintings as I could, in Parisian museums and in many museums in the United States and in books, looking for clues to architecture, clothing, settings.
Susan Vreeland
#77. History is representational, while time is abstract; both of these artifices may be found in museums, where they span everybody's own vacancy.
Robert Smithson
#78. Smithsonian is actually a group of nineteen different museums and a zoo,
John Grisham
#79. Finally, in the Mississippi state Senate, earmarks are often hidden in bond bills, which I have voted against many times, because our bonded indebtedness is too high and we simply can't afford it. For example, building museums in the middle of a recession makes little sense.
Chris McDaniel
#80. Inside the museums, | Infinity goes up on trial | Voices echo this is what salvation must be like after a while
Bob Dylan
#81. Use your time to bathe yourself in the gift. Move your hand across the canvas. Go to museums. Make this into an obsession.
Anna Deavere Smith
#83. 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
#84. 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
#85. Dallas is a huge city. Great shopping, great restaurants, great museums.
Julie Gonzalo
#86. During my time at high school and university in Kreuzlingen and St. Gallen, I traveled around Europe looking at art, visiting artists, studios, galleries and museums.
Hans Ulrich Obrist
#87. I'm a black male, over 40, with no kids, living in the suburbs - they wanted to put me in a museum. Why did I move to the suburbs? I started watching Desperate Housewives. If comedy didn't work out I can always try gardening.
Alonzo Bodden
#88. The only place where poverty should be is in museums.
Muhammad Yunus
#89. Technology is in fact one of the most exciting things that's happened to museums today - but one has to be careful about where one uses it. For instance, the Internet provides an incredible opportunity. It is a way for us to reach audiences around the world and further our educational mission.
Thomas P. Campbell
#90. There are moments when one feels a desperate gratitude for museums, whatever their own ambiguous histories. Their objects from lost cities lead us back to who we are.
Amy Davidson
#91. We do have Museums of African American Art in the United States, and there is a National Museum of Women's Art. However, I believe Latinos are best served by displaying their art next to the art of other groups, particularly North American, European, and even Asian artists.
Mari Carmen Ramirez
#92. The bull's-eyes end up in museums and on library shelves, not the misses. Which, when you think about it, is a shame. It feeds the myth that geniuses get it right the first time, that they don't make mistakes, when, in fact, they make more mistakes than the rest of us.
Eric Weiner
#93. The Arts Council of England, in a 1998 report on 11 countries, found that Germany spent $85 per capita on the arts. The United States spent a shocking $6. And Canada, in its stubborn balance, spent $46 ... It's the Canadian way to be halfway between the Old and New worlds.
Michael Audain
#94. Fewer and fewer Americans possess objects that have a patina, old furniture, grandparents pots and pans - the used things, warm with generations of human touch, essential to a human landscape. Instead, we have our paper phantoms, transistorized landscapes. A featherweight portable museum.
Susan Sontag
#95. Some of our greatest historical and artistic treasures we place with curators in museums; others we take for walks.
Roger A. Caras
#96. The way Starr felt in church, that's how I felt at the art museum, both safe and elevated.
Janet Fitch
#97. The total cost of the Federal Arts Project was only $23 million. Many of these paintings, sculptures and prints were given to museums, courthouses, public buildings. . .. I think that today those in museums alone are worth about $100 million.
Studs Terkel
#98. Museums should no longer concern themselves with history on a grand scale, the sagas of kings and heroes, or the forging of national identities; they should focus instead on the lives and belongings of ordinary people, just as modern novels do.
Orhan Pamuk
#99. The life of my people is to remember forever; each head granary is full. The life of your people is to forget: your thing granaries ("museums"), and not yourselves, are full.
Alice Walker
#100. I have traveled a fair amount, and I have visited some great cities. I love architecture and museums and castles and ruins and central markets and even double-decker bus tours. But, I am a sucker for a tropical beach.
Chelsea Cain
