Museums famous quotes
Last updated: Sep 5, 2024
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If the world were to end tomorrow and we could choose to save only one thing as the explanation and memorial to who we were, then we couldn't do better than the Natural History Museum, although it wouldn't contain a single human. The systematic Linnean order, the vast inquisitiveness and range of collated knowledge and beauty would tell all that is the best of us.
-- A. A. Gill -
A church is a hospital for sinners, not a museum for saints.
-- Abigail Van Buren -
I like the idea of the museum world and the university-academic situation where artists talk to each other or where artists or art students study with artists.
-- Ad Reinhardt -
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 -
The main function of the museum has been to serve as a pedestal upon which a clique of socialites pose as patrons of the arts
-- Albert C. Barnes -
The Philadelphia Museum of Art is a house of artistic and intellectual prostitution
-- Albert C. Barnes -
In Italian museums are sometimes found little painted screens that the priest used to hold in front of the face of condemned men to hide the scaffold from them.
-- Albert Camus -
It was 1975. I had spent the year at the Boston Museum School doing some very bizarre performance works. The last one included going to the North Magnetic Pole and spending all of my money.
-- Alex Grey -
The historical museum has to be very conservative and careful in its choices. The modern museum, on the other hand, has to be audacious, to take chances. It has to consider the probability that it would be wrong in a good many cases and take the consequences later.
-- Alfred H. Barr, Jr. -
The primary purpose of the Museum is to help people enjoy, understand, and use the visual arts of our time.
-- Alfred H. Barr, Jr. -
A dancer should learn from all the arts. Go to museums and look at the paintings. See how they balance things. Everything you do in the arts enriches you.
-- Alicia Alonso -
Every human encounter is the external embodiment of an attraction between two magnetic fields. The encounter comes suddenly, unexpectedly. It is a moment of truth. It is a moment of revelation, as when the right ray of sun penetrates through the right window pane, and falls with the right slant on one picture in the museum.
-- Amalia Kahana-Carmon -
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 -
SAD, BUT ONE DAY OUR KIDS WILL HAVE TO VISIT MUSEUMS TO SEE WHAT A LADY LOOKS LIKE.
-- Andre Benjamin -
My father has made a museum with my cuttings and photographs.
-- Andres Iniesta -
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 -
I think about that all of the time and I have this fantasy that I am going to work at a museum someday! I would love to do something like that!
-- Anna Sui -
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 -
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 -
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 -
I had hardly expected so dolichocephalic a skull or such well-marked supra-orbital development. Would you have any objection to my running my finger along your parietal fissure? A cast of your skull, sir, until the original is available, would be an ornament to any anthropological museum. It is not my intention to be fulsome, but I confess that I covet your skull.
-- Arthur Conan Doyle -
I do quite like sightseeing. I like churches, museums, galleries and all that stuff. I love the smell of a church in Italy or the smell of an old greasy spoon somewhere. I like markets and little funny shops in the backstreets of Florence.
-- Ashley Jensen -
Nobody would say the cowshed was heaven and nobody would say the inhuman torture of so many victims be called a revolution of the proletariat. ... A museum should be established to remind China of the follies and disasters that had fallen from 1966 to 1976. We cannot forget what had happened and history should not repeat itself.
-- Ba Jin -
Bus stops are far more interesting and useful places to have art than in museums,
-- Banksy -
The parts of graffiti I like are really antagonizing still - it's not something that a museum would really embrace.
-- Barry McGee -
New Rule: Since our new national position on science is, "Screw it, we prefer witchcraft," let's not just retire the Space Shuttle Atlantis. Let's drive it to one of the five stupidest States and have the locals beat it with sticks. Putting it in a museum is too dangerous. Someone could steal it, fly it into space and notice we revolve around the sun.
-- Bill Maher -
People have experiences in art museums today that they used to have in church.
-- Bill Viola -
I open events for museums and I do charity work and photography.
-- Bill Wyman -
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 -
It's a lovely experience walking around a museum by yourself.
-- Brad Pitt -
In an era when museum curators were busy introducing the public to photographs of daily life taken by Robert Frank, Henri Cartier-Bresson, and Diane Arbus, why did they simultaneously disdain paintings depicting the same kind of people?
-- Burton Silverman -
When I die there may be a paragraph or two in the newspapers. My name will linger in the British Museum Reading Room catalogue for a space at the head of a long list of books for which no one will ever ask.
-- C. S. Forester -
In some ways painters have been more important in my life than writers. Painters teach you how to see—a faculty that usually isn’t highly developed in poets. Whether you take a walk in the woods with a painter, or go to a museum with one, through them you notice shapes, colors, harmonies, relationships that enhance your own seeing.
-- Carolyn Kizer -
They examined all my organs. Some of them are quite remarkable and others are not so good. A lot of museums are bidding for them.
-- Casey Stengel -
I love England though; I've been back a few times and just love it. My favorite thing to do there is going to museums and all the castles. Oh, and my husband and I went mountain biking across England on our honeymoon!
-- Catherine Bell -
The empty, the angry, the lonely, the tricked, we are all museums of fear.
-- Charles Bukowski -
The noble science of Geology loses glory from the extreme imperfection of the record. The crust of the earth with its embedded remains must not be looked at as a well-filled museum, but as a poor collection made at hazard and at rare intervals.
-- Charles Darwin -
O man, I beseech you do not treat God's promises as if they were curiosities for a museum; but use them as every day sources of comfort. Trust the Lord whenever your time of need comes on.
-- Charles Spurgeon -
I love the Amazon. I just wanna to cry every time I go there both for the majestic beauty and for the fact that it's going to be a museum exhibit in a couple of decades if we don't stop the deforestation.
-- Chris Kilham -
Our spending priorities are clearly in question when we are increasing bond indebtedness on pet projects such as museums while our infrastructure is allegedly failing. Mississippians are spending more on basic needs than ever. They don’t need their state government making that worse.
-- Chris McDaniel -
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 -
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 -
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 -
I'm in favor of an art that does something other than just sit on its ***** in a museum.
-- Claes Oldenburg -
Dr. Margaret Oda, a true trailblazer in education, served as Honolulu school district superintendent and was the driving force behind the middle-school concept and the first chairwoman of the Japanese American National Museum.
-- Colleen Hanabusa -
Museums, museums, object-lessons rigged out to illustrate the unsound theories of archaeologists, crazy attempts to co-ordinate and get into a fixed order that which has no fixed order and will not be co-coordinated! It is sickening! Why must all experience be systematized? 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 -
Glass is the most magical of all materials. It transmits light in a special way...Im pleased that my art appeals to so many people of all ages. As a parent and an artist, Im especially looking forward to leaving a legacy at The Childrens Museum, a place where I hope my work brings joy to children who visit from all over the world.
-- Dale Chihuly -
Buy art, build a museum, put your name on it, let people in for free. That's as close as you can get to immortality...
-- Damien Hirst -
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 -
The ear plays the role of the guide in the museum in the concert I'm taking now. We don't have an oral guide, we have to provide it ourselves. One reason why active listening is absolutely essential.
-- Daniel Barenboim -
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 -
I think there is a new awareness in this 21st century that design is as important to where and how we live as it is for museums, concert halls and civic buildings.
-- Daniel Libeskind -
We met with the poet Frank O'Hara, who was a link between Upper and Lower Bohemia, and who worked at the Museum of Modern Art, where we had hoped to do the readings.
-- David Amram -
London has fine museums, the British Library is one of the greatest library institutions in the world... It's got everything you want, really.
-- David Attenborough -
I find it a bit sad that there is no photo of me hanging on the walls in the Berlin Museum at Checkpoint Charlie,
-- David Hasselhoff -
Then I got this idea in my head that magazines were like a gallery and if you got your magazine page ripped out and someone stuck it on their refrigerator, then that was a museum – someone’s private museum.
-- David LaChapelle -
Rumour has it that the gardens of natural history museums are used for surreptitious burial of those intermediate forms between species which might disturb the orderly classifications of the taxonomist.
-- David Lack -
250,000 species of plants and animals recorded and deposited in museums throughout the world did not support the gradual unfolding hoped for by Darwin.
-- David M. Raup -
A museum has to renew its collection to be alive, but that does not mean we give on important old works.
-- David Rockefeller -
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 -
They decided to establish a museum of modern art where works by contemporary artists would be shown. Mother was viewed as a very progressive person, and not everybody liked the paintings she bought.
-- David Rockefeller -
By a museum, I assume you mean an institution dedicated to the events of Sept. 11 and the aftermath. If that is done with sensitivity, I think it would be most appropriate.
-- David Rockefeller -
There's a statue of Jimmy Stewart in the Hollywood Wax Museum, and the statue talks better than he does.
-- Dean Martin -
The heart is a museum, filled with the exhibits of a lifetime's loves.
-- Diane Ackerman -
Humans have externalized their wisdom-stored it in museums, libraries, the expertise of the learned. Dog wisdom is inside the blood and bones.
-- Donald McCaig -
Speeches are for the younger men who are going places. And I'm not going anyplace except six feet under the floor of that little chapel adjoining the museum and library at Abilene.
-- Dwight D. Eisenhower -
I believe that Ryan Murphy is a genius. His instincts remind me of Andy Warhol. I recently went to the Warhol museum in Pittsburgh, and you can see a lot of echoes of Andy in Ryan's work. Like Andy, Ryan's finger is so on the pulse of culture that he's ahead of culture. Their aesthetic and their vision of the world are very similar.
-- Dylan McDermott -
A painting in a museum hears more ridiculous opinions than anything else in the world.
-- Edmond de Goncourt -
Surely nothing has to listen to so many stupid remarks as a painting in a museum.
-- Edmond de Goncourt -
The Guggenheim Museum Bilbao looks like a great adventure.
-- Eduardo Chillida -
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 -
You know... that a blank wall is an apalling thing to look at... The wall of a museum - a canvas - a piece of film - or a guy sitting in front of a typewriter. Then, you start out to do something - that vague thing called creation. The beginning strikes awe within you.
-- Edward Steichen -
Any city in America would like to get a museum built if they didn't have to pay for it.
-- Eli Broad -
Museums do not share their collections with other museums unless they get something in exchange. The Metropolitan will deal with the Louvre, but will they send their stuff to Memphis? No.
-- Eli Broad -
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 -
I never stay anywhere - parties, museums, meetings - longer than three hours.
-- Eli Broad -
Zalasiewicz is convinced that even a moderately competent stratigrapher will, at the distance of a hundred million years or so, be able to tell that something extraordinary happened at the moment in time that counts for us as today. This is the case even though a hundred million years from now, all that we consider to be the great works of man—the sculptures and the libraries, the monuments and the museums, the cities and the factories—will be compressed into a layer of sediment not much thicker than a cigarette paper.
-- Elizabeth Kolbert -
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 -
I like museums in Berlin a lot, especially in the eastern part. They're extraordinarily good.
-- Elliott Erwitt -
[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 -
If I went to somewhere busy, I wouldn't last very long. I can't go to a museum - I'll last 10 or 15 minutes in a museum. The problem is that when one person asks for a photograph, then someone sees a flash goes off, then everyone else sort of... it's sort of like a domino effect.
-- Emma Watson -
Life did not intend to make us perfect. Whoever is perfect belongs in a museum.
-- Erich Maria Remarque -
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 -
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 -
I would love to see as many of the black players as possible in today's Major League Baseball make every effort to go to the Negro Leagues Museum and get a first-hand view of how it all started.
-- Ferguson Jenkins -
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 -
A woman's quest in life should be to find the perfect apartment. And I have found the perfect apartment. The perfect apartment is the first floor of the Metropolitan Museum. With a sofa.
-- Fran Lebowitz -
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 -
Bilbao opened in 1997. It was only ten years later that I was asked to do another museum. A lot of other people got work because of Bilbao.
-- Frank Gehry -
People today read less, take fewer museum trips, and attend fewer concerts. Is that because these activities aren't as fun? The decline... can be traced, at least in part, to unconscious stimuli that make us live faster.
-- Frank Partnoy -
The line I trace with my feet walking to the museum is more important and more beautiful than the lines I find there hung up on the walls.
-- Friedensreich Hundertwasser -
The society that will organize production on the basis of a free and equal association of the producers will put the whole machinery of the state where it will then belong: into the museum of antiquities, by the side of the spinning wheel and the bronze axe.
-- Friedrich Engels -
Reality TV to me is the museum of social decay.
-- Gary Oldman -
An anthology of quotations is a museum of utterances.
-- Gary Saul Morson -
Unless created as freestanding works, quotations resemble "found" art. They are analogous, say, to a piece of driftwood identified as formally interesting enough to be displayed in an art museum or to a weapon moved from an anthropological to an artistic display.... The presenter of found art, whether material or verbal, has become a sort of artist. He has not made the object, but he has made it as art.
-- Gary Saul Morson -
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 -
In Germany, we often hear the absurd complaint that museums don't have the money to buy paintings. Of course, I'm not talking about me and my paintings. There are, after all, more popular painters in this country.
-- Georg Baselitz
