Jean Cocteau
Poet, Novelist, Playwright
"The Louvre is a morgue; you go there to identify your friends."
Museums quotes
Museums
594 quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
William S. Burroughs
Writer
"Out of the closets and into the museums, libraries, architectural monuments, concert halls, bookstores, recording studios and film studios of the world. Everything belongs to the inspired and dedicated thief…. Words, colors, light, sounds, stone, wood, bronze belong to the living artist. They belong to anyone who can use them. Loot the Louvre! A bas l’originalité, the sterile and assertive ego that imprisons us as it creates. Vive le vol-pure, shameless, total. We are not responsible. Steal anything in sight."
Muhammad Yunus
Social Entrepreneur
"One day our grandchildren will go to museums to see what poverty was like."
Muhammad Yunus
Social Entrepreneur
"Once poverty is gone, we'll need to build museums to display its horrors to future generations. They'll wonder why poverty continued so long in human society - how a few people could live in luxury while billions dwelt in misery, deprivation and despair."
Ansel Adams
Photographer
"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."
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Browse quotes that often appear alongside museums — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
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Museums quotes (page 1 of 30)
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"I never thought Jazz was meant to be a museum piece like other dead things once considered artistic."
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"Psychedelic drugs, especially psilocybin, allow a searchlight to be thrown on these deeper levels of the psyche, as Jung correctly stated. But it is not a museum of archetypes or psychic constructs, as he seemed to assume. It is a frontier of wholeness into which any person, so motivated and so courageous as to wish to do it, can go and leave the mundane plane far behind."
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"Cinderella and the prince lived, they say, happily ever after, like two dolls in a museum case never bothered by diapers or dust, never arguing over the timing of an egg, never telling the same story twice."
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"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!"
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"Republicans have called for a National African-American Museum. The plan is being held up by finding a location that isn't in their neighborhood."
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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."
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"A day will come when a cannon will be exhibited in museums, just as instruments of torture are now, and the people will be astonished that such a thing could have been."
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"A record is a concert without halls and a museum whose curator is the owner."
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"Above all, artists must not be only in art galleries or museums - they must be present in all possible activities. The artist must be the sponsor of thought in whatever endeavor people take on, at every level."
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"The people who make art their business are mostly imposters."
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"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."
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"SAD, BUT ONE DAY OUR KIDS WILL HAVE TO VISIT MUSEUMS TO SEE WHAT A LADY LOOKS LIKE."
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"Civil servants and priests, soldiers and ballet-dancers, schoolmasters and police constables, Greek museums and Gothic steeples, civil list and services list -- the common seed within which all these fabulous beings slumber in embryo is taxation."
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""Dr. Munro, sir," said he, "I am a walking museum. You could fit what ISN'T the matter with me on to the back of a -- visiting card. If there's any complaint you want to make a special study of, just you come to me, sir, and see what I can do for you. It's not every one that can say that he has had cholera three times, and cured himself by living on red pepper and brandy.""
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"I don't want to sound pretentious, but I love art, I like to go to museums, and I like to read books."
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"In a museum in Havana, there are two skulls of Christopher Columbus, one when he was a boy and one when he was a man"
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"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."
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"I went to the museum where they had all the heads and arms from the statues that are in all the other museums."
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"Real museums are places where Time is transformed into Space."
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"I think that objects have memories. I’m always thinking that I’ll go to the museum and see something and have a big memory about some other lifetime."
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