British Museum Quotes:

A painting in a museum hears more ridiculous opinions than anything else in the world.

- Edmond de Goncourt

topic: Art, Museums, World, British Museum

To look at and properly appreciate the British Museum is the work of a lifetime.

- M. E. W. Sherwood

topic: Work, Museums, Appreciate, British Museum

If there was a little room somewhere in the British Museum that contained only about twenty exhibits and good lighting, easy chairs, and a notice imploring you to smoke, I believe I should become a museum man.

- J. B. Priestley

topic: Believe, Men, Museums, Good Lighting, British Museum

Yesterday I visited the British Museum; an exceedingly tiresome affair. It quite crushes a person to see so much at once; and I wandered from hall to hall with a weary and heavy heart. The present is burdened too much with the past.

- Nathaniel Hawthorne

topic: Crush, Heart, Past, British Museum, Heavy Heart

When a man wants to write a book full of unassailable facts, he always goes to the British Museum.

- Anthony Trollope

source: Anthony Trollope (2014). “The Landleaguers”, p.231, Simon and Schuster

topic: Book, Writing, Men, British Museum

The biggest looters are the British Museum.

- Lowkey

source: Song: Dear England

topic: Museums, British, British Museum

I wonder if a single thought that has helped forward the human spirit has ever been conceived or written down in an enormous room: except, perhaps, in the reading room of the British Museum.

- Kenneth Clark

source: Kenneth Clark (2015). “Civilisation”, p.120, Hachette UK

topic: Reading, Museums, Rooms, Reading Room, British Museum

The British Museum was founded with a civic purpose: to allow the citizen, through reasoned inquiry and comparison, to resist the certainties that endanger free society and are still among the greatest threats to our liberty.

- Neil MacGregor

source: "The whole world in our hands" by Neil MacGregor, www.theguardian.com. July 23, 2004.

topic: Museums, Liberty, Citizens, British Museum

It seems to me one cannot sit down in that place [the Round Reading room of the British Museum] without a heart full of grateful reverence. I own to have said my grace at the table, and to have thanked Heaven for my English birthright, freely to partake of these beautiful books, and speak the truth I find there.

- William Makepeace Thackeray

topic: Beautiful, Book, Reading, Reading Room, Beautiful Books

I’d been to the British museum before. In fact I’ve been in more museums than I like to admit—it makes me sound like a total geek. [That’s Sadie in the background, yelling I am a total geek. Thanks, Sis.]

- Rick Riordan

source: Rick Riordan (2010). “The Kane Chronicles, The, Book One: Red Pyramid”, Hyperion

topic: Museums, Yelling, Sound, Sadie, British Museum

If people don't like Marxism, they should blame the British Museum.

- Mikhail Gorbachev

topic: Museums, People, Blame, British Museum

I guess it started in London, the night our dad blew up the British museum.

- Rick Riordan

source: Rick Riordan (2010). “The Kane Chronicles, The, Book One: Red Pyramid”, Hyperion

topic: Dad, Night, Museums, British Museum

[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

topic: Book, Museums, Trying, British Museum, Useless Information

Great works of art can be produced in barbarous societies - in fact the very narrowness of primitive society gives their ornamental art a peculiar concentration and vitality. At some time in the ninth century one could have looked down the Seine and seen the prow of a Viking ship coming up the river. Looked at today in the British Museum, it is a powerful work of art; but to the mother of a family trying to settle down in her little hut, it would have seemed less agreeable - as menacing to her civilisation as the periscope of a nuclear submarine.

- Kenneth Clark

source: "Civilisation" by Kenneth Clark, (Ch. 1), 1969.

topic: Mother, Art, Powerful, Vikings, British Museum

Evolution writ large is the belief that a cloud of hydrogen will spontaneously invent extreme-ultraviolet lithography, perform Swan Lake, and write all the books in the British Museum.

- Fred Reed

topic: Book, Writing, Lakes, Swan Lake, British Museum

Read properly, fewer books than a hundred would suffice for a liberal education. Read superficially, the British Museum Library might still leave the student a barbarian.

- Alfred Richard Orage

topic: Book, Museums, Library, Liberal Education, British Museum

I’m curious about things that people aren’t supposed to see—so, for example, I liked going to the British Museum, but I would like it better if I could go into all the offices and storage rooms, I want to look in all the drawers and—discover stuff. And I want to know about people. I mean, I know it’s probably kind of rude but I want to know why you have all these boxes and what’s in them and why all your windows are papered over and how long it’s been that way and how do you feel when you wash things and why don’t you do something about it?

- Audrey Niffenegger

source: Audrey Niffenegger (2009). “Her Fearful Symmetry: A Novel”, p.131, Simon and Schuster

topic: Mean, Museums, Long, British Museum

I've heard the sound of 70 condoms being scraped over the floor at the British Museum. It feels like being an adventurer. Why would you stay in your living room if you could go out and experience things no one's ever experienced?

- Herbert

source: Interview with Nitsuh Abebe, pitchfork.com. November 10, 2008.

topic: Museums, Sound, Rooms, British Museum

We went to the British Museum, and I was looking up my family in the books - pages and pages on it.

- Nicholas Lea

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

topic: Book, Museums, Pages, British Museum

I enter a whorehouse with the same interest as I do the British museum or the Metropolitan - in the same spirit of curiosity. Here are the works of man, here is an art of man, here is the eternal pursuit of gold and pleasure. I couldn't be more sincere. This doesn't mean that if I go to La Scala in Milan to hear Carmen I want to get up on the stage and participate. I do not. Neither do I always participate in a fine representative national whorehouse - but I must see it as a spectacle, an offering, a symptom of a nation.

- Errol Flynn

topic: Wisdom, Art, Mean, Milan, Metropolitan

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

topic: Book, Reading, Museums, Paragraph, Reading Room

If I let my fingers wander idly over the keys of a typewriter it might happen that my screed made an intelligible sentence. If an army of monkeys were strumming on typewriters they might write all the books in the British Museum. The chance of their doing so is decidedly more favourable than the chance of the molecules returning to one half of the vessel.

- Arthur Eddington

topic: Book, Writing, Army, Strumming, British Museum

Man seems to be a rickety poor sort of thing, any way you take him; a kind of British Museum of infirmities and inferiorities. He is always undergoing repairs. A machine that was as unreliable as he is would have no market.

- Mark Twain

source: Mark Twain (1973). “What Is Man? and Other Philosophical Writings”, p.87, Univ of California Press

topic: Men, Museums, Machines, British Museum

If an army of monkeys were strumming on typewriters, they might write all the books in the British Museum.

- Arthur Eddington

source: The Nature of the Physical World ch. 4 (1928)

topic: Book, Writing, Army, Strumming, British Museum

For many, the icon of the British Museum is the Rosetta Stone, that administrative by-product of the Greek imperial adventure in Africa.

- Neil MacGregor

topic: Adventure, Icons, Museums, Rosetta Stone, British Museum

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

topic: Islands, Museums, Gold, British Museum

We have a hieroglyphical inscription in the British Museum as early as the reign of Sevechus of the eighth century before the Christian era, showing that the doctrine of Trinity in Unity already formed part of their religion and that ... the three gods only made one person.

- Samuel Sharpe

source: Samuel Sharpe (1863). “Egyptian mythology and Egyptian Christianity, with their influence on the opinions of modern Christendom”, p.14

topic: Christian, Museums, Unity, Inscriptions, British Museum

The fact is that the British Museum had a complete specimen of a dodo in their collection up until the 18th century - it was actually mummified, skin and all - but in a fit of space-saving zeal, they actually cut off the head and they cut off the feet and they burned the rest in a bonfire.

- Adam Savage

topic: Cutting, Museums, Feet, 18th Century, Bonfire

You must get into the habit of looking intensely at words, and assuring yourself of their meaning, syllable by syllable-nay, letter by letter... you might read all the books in the British Museum (if you could live long enough) and remain an utterly "illiterate," undeducated person; but if you read ten pages of a good book, letter by letter, - that is to say, with real accuracy- you are for evermore in some measure an educated person.

- John Ruskin

source: John Ruskin, John D. Rosenberg (1964). “The Genius of John Ruskin: Selections from His Writings”, p.297, University of Virginia Press

topic: Real, Book, Museums, British Museum

In my experience, Cupid's arrows rarely strike two people with the same definition of cleanliness. One partner usually feels like he or she is being asked to live in a furniture exhibit in the British Museum. The other partner remains convinced that he or she is forced to contend with the human version of Hurricane Gilbert.

- Margo Kaufman

topic: Museums, Two, Arrows, Exhibits, British Museum