Quotes About Museums

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

We believe that poverty does not belong in a civilized human society. It belongs in museums [...] A poverty-free world might not be perfect, but it would be the best approximation of the ideal.

Imagination, as Napoleon once remarked, rules the world. One of our great problems is that we have relegated imagination to various artsy ghettos, there to let it play. But imagination, including—especially including—artistic imagination, has to be understood as a practical science. It must govern everything, and if it is detached from the praxis of life and then uprooted, it goes off to the art museums to die. For

When the travesties scattered throughout our modern art museums are set alongside the glories of ancient Greece, the Christian heart should swell with pride.

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

I'm a contemporary artist and I show in art galleries and museums. I show a number of photographs and films, but I also make television programs, books and some appetizing, all with the same concept.

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

Each year, tens of millions of museumgoers walk through the entrance of the Getty, or the Metropolitan or the Prado or the Hermitage, and never consider the possibility of having to arbitrate for themselves the authenticity of what they have come to see.

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.

So he said, 'What would you like to do? What is your desire really?' I said, 'Doctor, I don't think you're going to find this very healthy and clear, but I really would like to stop working forever–never work again, never do anything like the kind of work I'm doing now–and do nothing but write poetry and have leisure to spend the day outdoors and go to museums and see friends.

IN EUROPE, I vomited into small buckets and brushed my teeth repeatedly with chalky British toothpaste. I lay prone on the bathroom floors of several museums, feeling the cold tile underneath my cheek as my brain liquefied and seeped out my ear, bubbling. Migraines left my blood spreading across unfamiliar hotel sheets, dripping on the floors, oozing into carpets, soaking through leftover croissants and Italian lace cookies.

The museums are here to teach the history of art and something more as well, for, if they stimulate in the weak a desire to imitate, they furnish the strong with the means of their emancipation.

I don't go to enough exhibitions, purely because it intimidates me.

When museums are built these days, architects, directors, and trustees seem most concerned about social space: places to have parties, eat dinner, wine-and-dine donors. Sure, these are important these days - museums have to bring in money - but they gobble up space and push the art itself far away from the entrance.

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.

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.

Our Civil War history is important, but it belongs in textbooks and museums - not a place of allegiance on our Capitol grounds.

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.

What if we sought to develop a culture of thinking in our schools, classrooms, museums, meetings, and organizations?

Louvre, the Musée d'Orsay, Centre Pompidou, Cluny, Musée Jacquemart-André

We 'preserve' folk songs, at the same time that our way of life destroys the singer…we are proud of our museums, where we display the damning evidence of a way of life that we have made impossible.

He goes to the Musée Carnavalet and admires the decor of crumbled palaces restored, room by room

And everything soon must change. Men would set their watches by other suns than this. Or time would vanish. We would need no personal names of the old sort in the sidereal future, nothing being fixed. We would be designated by other nouns. Days and nights would belong to the museums. The earth a memorial park, a merry-go-round cemetery. The seas powdering our bones like quartz, making sand, grinding our peace for us by the aeon. Well, that would be good - a melancholy good.

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.