Museums Quotes

• 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.

  Hans Haacke

  Educational, Views, Giving

  "Portraits: Talking with Artists at the Met, the Modern, the Louvre, and Elsewhere". Book by Michael Kimmelman, 1998.

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• Real museums are places where Time is transformed into Space.

  Orhan Pamuk

  Real, Space, Familiar Places

  Orhan Pamuk (2009). “The Museum of Innocence”, p.510, Vintage

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  A church is a hospital for sinners, not a museum for saints.

  Abigail Van Buren

  Religion, Church, Saint

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• When in a museum, walk slowly but keep walking.

  Gertrude Stein

  Walks, Walking

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• A visit to a museum is a search for beauty, truth, and meaning in our lives. Go to museums as often as you can.

  Maira Kalman

  Our Lives

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• Museums should be places where you raise questions, not just show stuff.

  William Thorsell

  Raises Questions, Stuff, Should

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• Living is like tearing through a museum. Not until later do you really start absorbing what you saw, thinking about it, looking it up in a book, and remembering - because you can't take it in all at once.

  Audrey Hepburn

  Education, Book, Thinking

  "Audrey Hepburn : A Bio-bibliography". Book by David Hofstede, 1994.

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• A museum is a place where one should lose one's head.

  Renzo Piano

  Architect, Should, Loses

  "8 Unconventional - And Brilliant - Ideas for Getting Over a Breakup" by Kate Friedman, www.glamour.com. June 1, 2017.

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• The primary purpose of the Museum is to help people enjoy, understand, and use the visual arts of our time.

  Alfred H. Barr, Jr.

  Art, People, Purpose

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• I spent an hour looking at pots and carpets in the museums the other day, until the desire to describe them became like the desire for the lusts of the flesh.

  Virginia Woolf

  Lust, Desire, Flesh

  Virginia Woolf (1976). “The Letters of Virginia Woolf”

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• 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

  Country, Art, Mean

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• The most basic task of any museum must be the protection of works of cultural significance entrusted to its care for the edification and pleasure of future generations.

  Martin Filler

  Tasks, Generations, Edification

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• It is as much the conversations between objects as between us and objects that make museums so valuable.

  Antony Gormley

  Conversation, Valuable, Objects

  "The heart of Albertopolis", www.theguardian.com. June 23, 2007.

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• 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

  Vacancy, May, Abstract

  Robert Smithson, Jack D. Flam (1996). “Robert Smithson, the Collected Writings”, p.41, Univ of California Press

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• Museums, I love museums.

  Tony Randall

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• In museums and palaces we are alternate radicals and conservatives.

  Henry James

  Palaces, Radical

  Henry James (1993). “Collected Travel Writings: The Continent”, p.550, Library of America

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  Give me a museum and I'll fill it.

  Pablo Picasso

  Witty, Powerful, Humorous

  "Biography/ Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

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

  Arnold Palmer

  Inspirational Sports, Art, Athlete

  Arnold Palmer (2016). “A Life Well Played: My Stories”, p.31, St. Martin's Press

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• Each living art object, taken out of its native habitat so we can conveniently gaze at it, is like an animal in a zoo. Something about it has died in the removal.

  Daniel J. Boorstin

  Art, Zoos, Taken

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• Museums are tombs, and it looks like everything is turning into a museum.

  Robert Smithson

  Artist, Looks, Tombs

  Robert Smithson, Jack D. Flam (1996). “Robert Smithson, the Collected Writings”, p.42, Univ of California Press

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• ... what is important is not so much what people see in the gallery or the museum, but what people see after looking at these things, how they confront reality again. Really great art regenerates the perception of reality; the reality becomes richer, better or not, just different.

  Gabriel Orozco

  Art, Reality, People

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• The heaping together of paintings by Old Masters in museums is a catastrophe; likewise, a collection of a hundred Great Brains makes one big fathead.

  Carl Jung

  Pain, Brain, Together

  Carl Gustav Jung, Herbert Read, Michael Scott Montague Fordham, Gerhard Adler (1964). “The Collected Works of C.G. Jung: Civilization in transition”

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• The best museums and museum exhibits about science or technology give you the feeling that, hey, this is interesting, but maybe I could do something here, too.

  Paul Allen

  Technology, Giving, Interesting

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• The Museum is not meant either for the wanderer to see by accident or for the pilgrim to see with awe. It is meant for the mere slave of a routine of self- education to stuff himself with every sort of incongruous intellectual food in one indigestible meal.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Self, Intellectual, Meals

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• I've never made the separation between, say, the museum and the hardware store. I mean, I enjoy both of them, and I want to combine the two.

  Andy Warhol

  Mean, Two, Want

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