Top 151 Museums Quotes

When I began playing the lute, in 1950 there were not too many lutenists around. I had to work hard, writing out music in museums and libraries. It was before the days of photocopying. And I had just picked up the lute, adapted my guitar technique to it and went from there.

My dream was always to be in museums. It’s a big and important milestone and a fulfillment of one of my primary ambitions.

Museums are like sports stadiums, hotels and hospitals: they are in the category of captive-audience dining.

I’ve seen beautiful art on the sides of buildings. I’ve seen beautiful art in museums. I’ve seen beautiful art in galleries. Beautiful art is everywhere.

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.

In museums and palaces we are alternate radicals and conservatives.

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.

There are too many war museums.

I enjoy art, architecture, museums, churches and temples; anything that gives me insight into the history and soul of the place I’m in. I can also be a beach bum – I like to laze in the shade of a palm tree with a good book or float in a warm sea at sundown.

Museums are not normally presenting the works on the walls as provocations to work. It’s more like going to a Jacuzzi.

The Frankfurt Museum of Decorative Arts is a handsome building, which takes its cues from the riverside Biedermeier villa next to it, and it is well-integrated into an overall scheme for a group of small museums.

Norman Rockwell – even though we think of him as a great American artist, in a lot of museums he has not garnered that kind of attention. And it’s this kind of accessibility that we’re trying to bring – not looking down on any art.

Switzerland felt incredibly narrow, growing up. It was good, in a way. There were so many museums. But it was always a no-brainer that I would have to leave, and I’m grateful for that.

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.

One of the brilliant things about Britain is the way you’ve managed to save old things but to keep using them – that they’ve not just become museums the way they do in the United States.

Of course, museums and galleries and art spaces will continue to ground the art world. But certainly the public – as well as artists – also benefit when art is encountered in other everyday situations.

What I’m very upset about is the attempt to dictate to museums what they show, and the statements made by politicians in Washington that have curtailed the freedom of the National Endowment for the Arts. The attention to those issues is deflected by the spin of my supposedly having trivialized the Holocaust.

I am like a sponge: I adore reading, watching films, and visiting museums and exhibitions. I am always in search of new things in many spheres.

There are so many great galleries and museums in London, but they can be very crowded during the day.

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.

I grew up in New York City. I went to museums so much as a kid, and I guess I didn’t realize how much it affected me.

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.

I am a keen medievalist and like going around museums and ruins and finding out about the people and local culture. I’m not one for sitting by a pool or lying on a beach. I also like to sketch while I’m on holiday, if I have time.

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.

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.

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.

I have been brought up around art. Even now, when I travel, I love going to museums and spend hours in front of paintings. Art is like oxygen for me. That’s what I miss in Bombay.

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.

Much of what’s called ‘public’ is increasingly a private good paid for by users – ever-higher tolls on public highways and public bridges, higher tuitions at so-called public universities, higher admission fees at public parks and public museums.

Museums, I think, are becoming more and more aware of how to turn themselves into a must-see spectacle.

If the standard for art is the decency of its creators, we’re going to have a lot of empty museums.

European museums are all dependent on government financing. The moment European governments are under financial pressure, their budgets are cut.

Films go into vaults, art into museums, and music into halls of fame. Most fashion is worn for a few seasons and off-loaded into the recycling bin or, worse, some landfill.

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.

I love ruins and museums but, if I’ve been working hard, I enjoy a beach holiday.

I started traveling by myself as early as 5 to see my dad. I’d go to Toronto or Los Angeles, depending on what show he was doing, but most often New York, and we would hang out, and he’d take me to museums and Broadway plays. The ones that had the biggest impact on me were the George C. Wolfe productions.

We live in a world where art exists in galleries and museums, and musicians have to play the same venues over and over.

It is important never to forget our history, but parts of our history are more appropriately displayed in museums, not on government property.

I spend all day in museums. I even eat my lunch in the museum, and I take a nap for one hour there.

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.

I’m a rock climber, a high-altitude climber, an adventurer, a storyteller through my museums, and a writer of more than 50 books.

I grew up going to museums. I was privileged to discover art and artists in a very personal way.

I have a pretty big range of interests. I love art; I love going to the museums. I dabble in painting, and although I’m not very good at it, I enjoy it.

When I was growing up, my mother would take me to plays and museums, and we’d talk about life. Those times helped shape who I became.

Summer is a great time to visit art museums, which offer the refreshing rinse of swimming pools – only instead of cool water, you immerse yourself in art.

Tourists as well as natives want to see cultural achievements – whether it’s the Banaue Terraces, the old churches or museums.

I’m a closet nerd. I love to study history and visit museums.

All of our lives are enriched by our culture, from blockbuster films, best-selling video games, independent music, and internationally-renowned museums and art collections, to theatre, opera, ballet, literary festivals and performance poetry.

Cash as a physical entity will virtually cease to exist, with coins and checkbooks consigned to museums. As people conduct their financial transactions on hand-held devices made secure by advanced biometrics, even tipping will be done electronically.

If you’re gonna do museums, some of the best in the world are in D.C.

Egypt really is one of the worlds greatest open-air museums.

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.

I go to museums. I buy art, even. You should see my house; we don’t have any wall space left.

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.

There’s probably more history now preserved underwater than in all the museums of the world combined. And there’s no law governing that history. It’s finders keepers.

I like to read, walk, cook, and travel to cities. We live in the country, so we miss museums and the bustle of city life.

The U.S. museums weren’t looking at my paintings at all – they hated them, irredeemably. People metaphorically threw up when they saw my work! They thought I was enlarging comics, or just copying them.

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.

Andy was a nonverbal person; you couldn’t get directions out of him. All he knew was what was modern in art was what wasn’t art: The telephone was art, the pizza was art, but what was hanging on walls in museums wasn’t art.

Dumbing down takes many forms: art that is good for you, museums that flatter you, universities that increase your self-esteem. Culture, after all, is really about you.

Museums are managers of consciousness. They give us an interpretation of history, of how to view the world and locate ourselves in it. They are, if you want to put it in positive terms, great educational institutions. If you want to put it in negative terms, they are propaganda machines.

In big museums, the role of the curator has shrunk in recent years as different branches of curatorial work – such as interpretation, or learning, or conservation – have split off and become professions of their own.

By and large, most of the work that we see in the great museums throughout the world are populated with people who don’t happen to look like me.

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.

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.

There is much about the shared terrain of being a black person in the United States that is not seen on small or silver screens or in museums or best-selling books, and much of what gets ignored in the mainstream thrives, and is celebrated, on Twitter.

Museums are for dead artists. I’d never show my work in the Tate. You’d never get me in that place.

I don’t plan out my visits rigorously, but I do have a list of about 125 New York galleries, alternative spaces, museums, and so forth that I visit regularly. That’s the closest thing I have to a strategy: I go to a lot of places, many that artists don’t visit.

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.

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!

It’s hardly even noticeable that so many artists, designers and architects live here. It isn’t reflected in the cityscape or in the museums. Many of the artists, for example, exhibit around the world, just not in Berlin.

When I was young, watching historical movies made me feel absolutely sublime. But the first few times I visited costume museums, I was really disappointed because it was not at the level I saw in movies. It was not the level of the image I’d imagined.

The museums and parks are graveyards above the ground- congealed memories of the past that act as a pretext for reality.

I don’t particularly like showing furniture on pedestals, but for whatever reasons you always have to in museums.

Museums are like the quiet car of the world. It’s a place you can come to escape, where there’s authenticity, there’s uniqueness, there’s calm, there’s physicality.

I open events for museums and I do charity work and photography.

Most museums in Moscow, like Tretyakov, were established by philanthropists, whose passion for art allowed the development of culture on many levels.

Even though education was key in my family, I had no access to museums or art where we lived. I was a bit starved.

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.

I never stay anywhere – parties, museums, meetings – longer than three hours.

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.

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.

Success in the art world means getting invitations to exhibit in some great places. I had shown in contemporary art museums in Europe, America, New Zealand and Japan. I’d also been asked to curate shows, and had made work to go with my selections from historical collections.

I don’t need to be asking for money for local museums and other projects just to make me look good back home.

Some of our greatest historical and artistic treasures we place in museums; others, we take for walks.

I like going to museums and stuff, but I also like going out and doing lots of physical activity like camping and hiking. I like doing stuff that I’ve never done before. Curiosity is a big thing. Usually it means that people are intelligent and that they want to learn stuff about the world.

People expect things from art that are horrible for us who make it! They put the things we make in these restrictive places called ‘museums,’ then don’t want to hear another word from us.

Wear your clothes with abandon, I say; don’t keep them pristine as if for museums: They are meant to wear out. Then you get to buy new ones.

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.

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.

Dallas is a huge city. Great shopping, great restaurants, great museums.

Museums, I love museums.

History is representational, while time is abstract; both of these artifices may be found in museums, where they span everybody’s own vacancy.

In war, the first thing that goes, when you try to take over culture, is the statues. I think we all can recall statues with their heads cut off in museums.

I’m all in favor of supporting fancy museums and elite schools, but face it: These aren’t really charities as most people understand the term.

For a while I thought I would work in museums, so my first job after college was an internship at the 9/11 Museum. I quickly found out that I did not want to do that. So I signed up for culinary school, and directly following culinary school, I went to graduate school at McGill.

The Smithsonian museums are among this country’s most endearing treasures and I look forward to helping maintain and enhance their coveted works of art.

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.

Our universities and museums are respected around the country.

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.

In the years that I worked in museums, first as a summer student and eventually as a curator, one of the primary lessons I learned was this: History is shaped by the people who seek to preserve it. We, of the present, decide what to keep, what to put on display, what to put into storage, and what to discard.

We always have a great time touring Germany, but one of my favourite museums in the world is Museum Ludwig, an incredible contemporary art museum in Cologne. I could spend all day in it.

My parents were all about education. My mother was a librarian – she retired after 30 years – and she made sure that we were always at museums, that we went to plays.

In some of the great cities of Europe – Paris, Vienna, Prague, and Brussels – tourists bored with life above ground can descend below. All these cities have sewer museums and tours, and all expose their underbelly willingly to the curious. But not London, arguably the home of the most splendid sewer network in Europe.

My tastes formed quite early. All I ever wanted to do was go to costume museums.

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.

In many museums, you see one of this and one of that. You gain an understanding of what Abstract Expressionism or Minimalism is, but you aren’t given the chance to appreciate the mind of an artist.

A lot of our insights are based on the ways in which people spend time at museums. They’re curious, open, interested, and engaging. They want to express themselves and see their own identity refracted through the museum’s.

I’m the type of person who far prefers a vacation filled with trips to museums and art galleries, shopping and exploring vintage flea markets, people-watching at cafes, and discovering delicious restaurants as opposed to lounging on a beach for days on end.

We have created indoor installations inside museums, like the Wrapped Floor at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago in 1968, and not monumental at all by any standards.

I’ve seen many dinosaur fossils, some mounted in museums, others in the process of being extracted from their rocky matrix, and it has never occurred to me that any could be anything other than genuine.

I travel so much when I work, I’ve really been happy to do ‘Nice Work’ because I feel like a true New Yorker again. I have my little regimen during the day, and I can take advantage of the museums and the things that I love. And people watching!

Since then I have held many jobs at museums in Colorado and Wyoming. I have also taught summer courses at the University of Colorado.

The centuries-old history and culture of India, majestic architectural monuments and museums of Delhi, Agra and Mumbai have a unique attractive force.

Fifty percent of all meaningful education takes place in the home. What do you share with your child? You share your interests. I was a book person. I read with my son. My wife is an artist. She dragged his little butt around to museums. He’s an illustrator of children’s books.

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.

Artists don’t compare themselves to each other based on money. Nobody really knows what money other artists have. They don’t care that much. The measure is the work and how you think your work is perceived. How the museums are. How you are doing.

Museums and galleries do recruit art historians, but they are overwhelmingly white and middle class, or else from abroad. They understandably fret about the lack of diversity in their curating departments, but is it any wonder?

Small museums are great. Big museums are a drag.

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.

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.

Most people involved in the delivery of history, in universities, publishing, museums and the heritage industry, are aware that we have a problem with diversity and inclusivity.

Instead of stubbornly attempting to use surrealism for purposes of subversion, it is necessary to try to make of surrealism something as solid, complete and classic as the works of museums.

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.

Yes, my works… are enshrined in museums, but I don’t care if the pieces fall apart in 20 years.

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.

What other people may find in poetry or art museums, I find in the flight of a good drive.

Museums are interesting. This place where we’re almost buying admission to take a break from our lives.

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!

When I’m on the road, museums end up being a place I go to in different cities that is always interesting. Museums and independent record stores.

Kraftwerk has become historic and is now exposed in museums.

It’s usually a jolly good trick to pick up a local tour guide. They can tell you all the anecdotes that make a place interesting. I’m one for rushing off to museums at the crack of dawn, eating fabulous things on terraces for lunch, and enjoying long dinners on balmy evenings.

Museums are custodians of epiphanies, and these epiphanies enter the central nervous system and deep recesses of the mind.

There was a belief after World War I that painting could be an act of civil revolt. I want this exhibition, ‘New Museum,’ to be an act of civil disobedience. It’s not so much about the New Museum on the Bowery, but the idea of challenging museums as projections of cultural authority. It’s painting as insurgency.

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.

I love going to museums.

A lot of my work involves criss-crossing London to visit the many hundreds of projects, theaters, galleries, museums and groups that comprise the capital’s astonishingly rich cultural life.

Museums are good things, places to look and absorb and learn.

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.

Madrid is a big and beautiful city with great parks where I like to walk. There are a lot of squares and museums, historic monuments. But I’m more a home guy; I feel most comfortable there with my wife and kids. We play, watch cartoons, like all families do.

It was during my first trip to America in 1953 – that’s when I learned to visit museums. I was then 26 years old. When I travel, the first thing I do is to visit museums. When I go to New York City, I usually go to Broadway to see the shows.

When we moved to Europe when I was a teenager, I really did not want to go. I was happy in my school, with my friends, but looking back on it, it was the best experience I’ve ever had. We traveled every weekend. I experienced incredible new cultures, museums, cities, and it really opened up my eyes.

There were no museums or galleries in Shanghai, but I was very keen on art – I was always sketching and copying, and sometimes I think that my whole career as a writer has been the substitute work of an unfulfilled painter.

There are many museums dedicated to technology, artistic endeavors, music, and that sort of thing. From that perspective, I think games really do have a place as a kind of collaborative art or a synthesis of all these various aspects into a whole, and that, in itself, can be perceived as art.

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.

I find it difficult to go to museums. I prefer houses.

Murals in restaurants are on a par with the food in museums.

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.

There are wonderful museums with lots of photographs of 1920’s musicals.

We talk about theatre museums filled with old costumes and things. What we also need is a theatre museum of the old routines on videotape. We are only the custodians of those techniques, and they should be preserved.

As hard as I try I cannot get myself to three museums in any one city. The only museum I’ve ever really enjoyed was the Picasso Museum in Barcelona and I think that’s because it’s small and you can touch things.