Top 100 Quotes About Museums
#1. I educated myself, and it made me feel good. I went to museums. I read books. I did all the things, pretty much, that you would do in school. I would never want my kids to leave school, though, I'm really for education.
Stephanie Seymour
#2. It is veneer, rouge, aestheticism, art museums, new theaters, etc. that make America impotent. The good things are football, kindness, and jazz bands.
George Santayana
#3. Our universities and museums are respected around the country.
Jane Byrne
#4. Museums are the anthropological screened porches of suburbia. You can be near something great, but not actually personally experience it.
S. Kelley Harrell
#5. I don't do casinos or prisons; I like to do projects that enhance the lives of everyday people, like campus buildings, libraries, museums and government buildings. That's why I love working in the public sector.
Philip Freelon
#6. Sometimes, you just have to clear your head and get out to see other things. It is very important to be nourished. I love to go to museums and galleries, I like to see theatre, film, dance - anything creative. It doesn't promise you inspiration, but it nourishes your creative soul, and that's good.
Marc Jacobs
#7. MUMMY, n. - an ancient Egyptian handy, too, in museums in gratifying the vulgar curiosity that serves to distinguish man from the lower animals.
Ambrose Bierce
#8. And if out of a million visitors there is even one to whom art means something, that is enough to justify museums.
Pierre-Auguste Renoir
#9. Museums and bookstores should feel, I think, like vacant lots - places where the demands on us are our own demands, where the spirit can find exercise in unsupervised play.
John Updike
#10. I went to the museum where they had all the heads and arms from the statues that are in all the other museums.
Steven Wright
#11. The Beautiful is everywhere; perhaps more in the arrangement of your saucepans on the white walls of your kitchen than in your eighteenth-century living room or in the official museums.
Fernand Leger
#12. Most species of dragons had retired or, mistaken for dinosaurs, collectively hung their bones in museums, waiting in the wings for just the right time to reemerge, to scorch schools and char church parking lots.
Tom Cardamone
#13. You have to love dancing to stick to it. It gives you nothing back, no manuscripts to store away, no paintings to show on walls and maybe hang in museums, no poems to be printed and sold, nothing but that single fleeting moment when you feel alive.
Merce Cunningham
#14. There are so many great galleries and museums in London, but they can be very crowded during the day.
Zaha Hadid
#15. You become an expert by working hard. We've got fantastic museums, collections and antique shows. You can go and just start looking. That's the great thing about knowledge. If you collect Doulton figures, you know about the rare ones.
Judith Miller
#16. I remember when I first started putting things on the web and people were writing about it. I totally didn't keep up with what was going on because I wanted to present stuff in museums and galleries and have some presence on the web. I feel fortunate to have posted stuff in the beginning.
Kalup Linzy
#17. As cultural politics change, museums change with them.
Sharon Waxman
#18. Small paintings can be fantastic. But you can't often get a narrative out of a small painting. In any case, museums are huge places, and you want to take up some space.
Gary Hume
#19. Good docents often begin by asking the viewer, "What do you see in this work?" The idea that the expert should be allowed to constrain the interpretation of others rightly offends our sensibilities about museums and art. It ought to offend us just as much when applied to Scripture.
Dale B. Martin
#20. I'm interested in making works for museums in a way that make the space feel domestic, and I'm always thinking about how this work will be part of someone's daily life.
Camille Henrot
#21. My parents both had Oxford degrees, they read important books, spoke foreign languages, drank real coffee and went to museums for pleasure. People like that don't have fat kids: they were cut out to be winners and winners don't have children who are overweight.
Arabella Weir
#22. I wish I could write about shows outside New York. I often feel like the last person to know anything, because I almost never get to leave town, and when I do, I tend to go for three days max. Seeing between 30 and 40 shows a week in 100 or so galleries and museums takes up nearly all my time.
Jerry Saltz
#23. He smelled of moon swamps and old Egyptian bandages. He was something found in museums, wrapped in nicotine linens, sealed in glass. But he was alive, puling like a babe, and shriveling unto death, fast, very fast, before their eyes.
Ray Bradbury
#25. The itinerary of most antiquities from their source - tomb, temple, quarry - to the shelves of museums or private collectors is murky and often purposely concealed.
Peter Landesman
#26. We don't need youth museums. But we do need holy young people.
Pope Francis
#27. Living in Edinburgh, I consider myself particularly lucky - we have the biggest book festival in the world, a plethora of fascinating libraries and museums, and some of the greatest architecture in Europe.
Sara Sheridan
#28. I spend all day in museums. I even eat my lunch in the museum, and I take a nap for one hour there.
John Gokongwei
#29. Evolutionism is a religious world view that is not supported by science, Scripture, popular opinion, or common sense. The exclusive teaching of this dangerous, mind-altering philosophy in tax supported schools, parks, museums, etc. is a clear violation of the First Amendment.
Kent Hovind
#30. You'll have to take me to some museums, he said. He was being the young man on the road, following the sun because gray weather made him suicidal, writing his poetry in his mind in diners and gas station men's rooms across the country.
Francesca Lia Block
#31. In the period from 1945 to 1960, the number of orchestras in the country doubled, book sales rose some 250 percent, and art museums opened in most major cities. Ballet was quick to catch up: between 1958 and 1969 the number of ballet companies nationwide with more than twenty members nearly tripled.
Jennifer Homans
#33. Great Art is Great because it inspired you greatly. If it didn't, no matter what the critics, the museums and the galleries say, it's not great art for you.
Yoko Ono
#34. Museums are good things, places to look and absorb and learn.
Alan King
#35. To surround yourself with beauty isn't frivolous. It's a necessity. If it weren't, then our cities would not be surrounded with art museums and parks.
Charlotte Symonds
#36. I love learning. I love history. But there's history in everything. Every building, everybody you talk to. It's not limited to libraries and museums. I think people who spend their lives in school forget that sometimes. -Tak
Becky Chambers
#37. Since then I have held many jobs at museums in Colorado and Wyoming. I have also taught summer courses at the University of Colorado.
Robert T. Bakker
#38. I would never have expected anything that I did would ever appear in first-rate museums around the world. That was just a choice that I made, very early on. I was interested mainly in the entertainment arts. I wasn't as interested in being a fine artists.
Rick Heinrichs
#39. People don't really go to museums in Rio. I shouldn't say it's not sophisticated, but, you know, they go to the beach.
Francisco Costa
#40. I've always been a creative person since I was young. I enjoyed art, museums, plays, but it wasn't until I was about 10 that my mother encouraged me to choose a career, and it was acting.
Sufe Bradshaw
#41. All the painters who appear in our museums are
failures at painting; the only people ever talked
about are failures; the world is divided into two
categories of people: failures and those unknown.
Francis Picabia
#42. The centuries-old history and culture of India, majestic architectural monuments and museums of Delhi, Agra and Mumbai have a unique attractive force.
Vladimir Putin
#43. This is the worst problem with living history museums. They always leave the best parts out. Like typhus. And opium. And scarlet letters. Shunning. Witch-burning.
Chuck Palahniuk
#44. I don't do sports, and my idea of hell is being dragged around ruins/museums/famous buildings, so I guess I'm a beach bum.
John Niven
#45. Museums don't like things to be thrown away, in case they turn out to be very important later on.
Terry Pratchett
#46. I always try to have a book on hand, traveling is an excellent way of providing perspective, and studying Art History has made going to art museums way more fun than you can imagine.
Gideon Glick
#47. The Sandwich Islands are not the same as Otaheite nor as the Fijis, from which they are distant about 4,000 miles, nor are their people of the same race. The natives are not cannibals, and it is doubtful if they ever were so. Their idols only exist in missionary museums.
Isabella Bird
#48. Museums that aren't perfect are the ones that I love. Museums that aren't overdesigned. I always like to visit the strange, odd museums. In New York, the Frick is absolutely my favorite, favorite place because I like to think that it was someone's home not that long ago.
Reed Krakoff
#49. I believe in the democratization of the arts. What do I mean by that? I think museums, with some exceptions, have a responsibility to educate a much broader public.
Eli Broad
#50. I'm spending a lot of time in the Palazzo and in the museums. I'm printing [pictures that I take] and making a binder with a mix of internet research and palazzo research that I'm planning to use for the upcoming works.
Camille Henrot
#51. Most museums in Moscow, like Tretyakov, were established by philanthropists, whose passion for art allowed the development of culture on many levels.
Dasha Zhukova
#52. Art is the closest you can get to immortality, though it's a poor substitute - you're working for people not yet born - and people want it because it is brilliant. It ends up in museums anyway; the rich have to give it back to the people, it's their only option. There are no pockets in a shroud.
Damien Hirst
#53. New York being what it is, our museums are vertical, not horizontal. That means the stumbling blocks to architectural clarity are unavoidable - but certainly surmountable.
Jerry Saltz
#54. I didn't expect to find much visible trace of the American war in Vietnam. The Vietnamese are too hard-bitten to dwell on it, and they've sanded away all but the outcroppings of history - the museums, the memorials.
Evan Osnos
#55. I have no intention of selling any more of the historical Apollo 11 items in my possession for the remainder of my life. I intend to pass a portion of these items on to my children and to loan the most important items for permanent display in suitable museums around the country.
Buzz Aldrin
#56. Forgive me also that I didn't fight like Lord Byron for the happiness of captive peoples that I watched only risings of the moon and museums
Zbigniew Herbert
#57. Being in America isn't old-hat - it's where we're from - but I get excited to be in other parts of the world like Athens and Croatia, which were quite cool. I'm a sightseer. I go see the sights and museums. I'm into that kind of thing.
Richie Sambora
#58. Although churches seem the most natural space to perform spiritual awakening, the disconcerting reality is that many people in Western society see churches more as museums of religion than sacred stages that dramatize the movement of God's spirit.
Diana Butler Bass
#59. I'd always been extremely fascinated by the French Nuit Blanche, which is a weekend that they have in Paris where they keep all the museums open until dawn. You can go and hang out in Versailles in the middle of the night and watch the sun come up.
Anna Wintour
#60. The number of great museums and nonprofits versus the number of corporate headquarters is incredibly out of whack.
Richard Stengel
#61. The museums and parks are graveyards above the ground- congealed memories of the past that act as a pretext for reality.
Robert Smithson
#62. If you're a painter, it's simply taken for granted that you'll spend a lot of time in museums studying great paintings, but if you're a cartoonist, it used to be very hard to see an original cartoon drawing.
Bill Watterson
#63. I'm not precisely saying that a really good board meeting at the MLA (Museums, Libraries and Archives Coucil) makes me want to go and write poetry, but there is a pleasure in doing that sort of thing well.
Andrew Motion
#64. When the purse strings tighten up at museums, the institutions usually cut back and cancel shows. That's exactly the wrong reaction. In fact, now is a good time for them to loosen up - a chance to breathe and experiment a little - and go for the juicy solution lurking in their own basements.
Jerry Saltz
#65. What other people may find in poetry or art museums, I find in the flight of a good drive.
Arnold Palmer
#66. My mother was a teacher, and when she wanted to show me art and literature and science, she'd take me to museums, parks and free exhibitions.
David Blaine
#67. I like to go to art museums and name the untitled paintings ... Boy With Pail ... Kitten On Fire.
Steven Wright
#68. The most awful museums are in China. They have magnificent stuff on display and just the worst way of displaying it. They just don't spend money on lighting and installation.
Elliott Erwitt
#69. Preservations are working to save neon signs for future generations, either on-site or in museums. After all, what would America be without a few giant doughnuts around.
Clifford A. Pickover
#70. Of course I believe imaginative architecture can make a difference to people's lives, but I wish it was possible to divert some of the effort we put into ambitious museums and galleries into the basic architectural building blocks of society.
Zaha Hadid
#71. 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
#72. Comics are given serious attention now and I'm quite surprised. You see them reviewed in major newspapers and exhibited in serious museums. I wouldn't have predicted it.
Seth
#73. For me, meaning of design is to give soul to objects by Art. Art sometimes need to be in every part of daily life, not only in the galleries and museums.
Baris Gencel
#74. I don't need to be asking for money for local museums and other projects just to make me look good back home.
Jim DeMint
#75. I believe profoundly in the importance of museums; I would go as far as to say that you can judge a society by the quality of its museums.
Richard Fortey
#76. Numerous are the posthumous museums and memorials devoted exclusively to one artist, architect or author and designed to preserve or artificially reconstruct the namesake's original working or living conditions.
Hans Ulrich Obrist
#77. We are all walking museums, housing our small portion of the epic human story.
James Hawthorne
#78. I hitchhiked to Miami in 1953, and there were oranges laying on the road, black shantytowns, and marinas with nice boats. The museums were virtually empty.
James Rosenquist
#79. I love doing normal things - movies, shopping, going out with friends, writing, reading, taking hot bubble baths - that's a big one for relaxation. I also love to go to art and history museums.
Christina Aguilera
#80. I love museums, and I think they're fantastic, but they don't touch the people who I frequently think need to be touched with at least some reminder of legacy.
Bryan Stevenson
#81. 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
#82. Museums are for dead artists. I'd never show my work in the Tate. You'd never get me in that place.
Damien Hirst
#83. Boston was a great city to grow up in, and it probably still is. We were surrounded by two very important elements: academia and the arts. I was surrounded by theater, music, dance, museums. And I learned how to sail on the Charles River. So I had a great childhood in Boston. It was wonderful.
Leonard Nimoy
#84. But as nothing, western or local, came to fill the void, the great drive to westernize amounted mostly to the erasure of the past; the effect on culture was reductive and stunting, leading families like mine, otherwise glad of republican progress, to furnish their houses like museums.
Orhan Pamuk
#85. Outside museums, in noisy public squares, people look at people. Inside museums, we leave that realm and enter what might be called the group-mind, getting quiet to look at art.
Jerry Saltz
#86. Museums provide places of relaxation and inspiration. And most importantly, they are a place of authenticity. We live in a world of reproductions - the objects in museums are real. It's a way to get away from the overload of digital technology.
Thomas P. Campbell
#87. As for pictures and museums, that don't trouble me. The worst of going abroad is that you've always got to look at things of that sort. To have to do it at home would be beyond a joke.
Margaret Oliphant
#88. I open events for museums and I do charity work and photography.
Bill Wyman
#89. A country that has few museums is both materially poor and spiritually poor ... Museums, like theaters and libraries, are a means to freedom.
Wendy Beckett
#90. 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
#91. Furniture that is too obviously designed is very interesting, but too often belongs only in museums.
Milo
#92. I always loved fashion and clothes. Not because I think that's a woman's place, but because I care about aesthetics. I like art; I like going to art museums, and to me, these things are just manifestations of one's aesthetic sense.
Leila Janah
#93. I like museums in Berlin a lot, especially in the eastern part. They're extraordinarily good.
Elliott Erwitt
#94. If there are frightful monsters in fairy tales, they do not frighten you now, because that kind of monster is no longer going about the world, whatever he may have done long, long ago. He has been turned into stone, and you may see his remains in museums.
Andrew Lang
#95. I've enjoyed photography, ever since I was a teenager, and I'm still at it. I've had shows in various cities, around the country, and I have a number of pieces in permanent collections in museums that I'm very proud of.
Leonard Nimoy
#96. A great department store, easily reached, open at all hours, is more like a good museum of art than any of the museums we have yet established.
John Cotton Dana
#97. My favorite big city would have to be Chicago. I lived in Indiana for several years and would always go into the city with my family for Cubs games or to visit the aquarium and museums on field trips.
Karen Fairchild
#98. I love to draw-pencil, ink pen-I love art. When I go on tour and visit museums in Holland, Germany or England-you know those huge paintings?-I'm just amazed. You don't think a painter could do something like that. I can look at a piece of sculpture or a painting and totally lose myself in it.
Michael Jackson
#99. But we cannot rely on memorials and museums alone. We can tell ourselves we will never forget and we likely won't. But we need to make sure that we teach history to those who never had the opportunity to remember in the first place.
Dan Rather
