Top 1200 Museum Of Natural History Quotes & Sayings - Page 3

You're like a witness. You're the one who goes to the museum and looks at the paintings. I mean the paintings are there and you're in the museum too, near and far away at the same time. I'm a painting. Rocamadour is a painting. Etienne is a painting, this room is a painting. You think that you're in the room but you're not. You're looking at the room, you're not in the room.

Typically your work will end up in a museum [after] you're dead. And maybe that's the function of a museum. It's an archive of your work after you're dead.

[Theodore Roosevelt] was a naturalist on the broadest grounds, uniting much technical knowledge with knowledge of the daily lives and habits of all forms of wild life. He probably knew tenfold more natural history than all the presidents who had preceded him, and, I think one is safe in saying, more human history also.

History is one war after another with a bunch of murders and natural disasters in between.

[Cameras] tend to turn people into things and the photograph extends and multiplies the human image to the proportions of mass-produced merchandise and, [in the age of photography] the world itself becomes a sort of museum of objects that have been encountered before in some other museum and to say that the camera cannot lie is merely to underline the multiple deceits that are now practiced in its name.

Once they have actually left office, we seem to grow fonder of our ex-presidents - and they of each other. That's why so many sighed in approval at Michelle Obama's public display of affection with George W. Bush at last month's dedication of the National Museum of African-American History and Culture.

Fairy tales and myths are forms of cultural storage for the natural history of life.

I think about museums often. There are things that I want museums to do that they often don't. For me, I like it when there's a system within the museum that can continuously change - whether it's a museum that is nomadic or one that's designed so the building can shape-shift. I like restless spaces, and I want to be engaged.

I've put live performance in a lot of spaces. Part of what I want to do is take over the takeover. Another way that someone put it is, you climb over the fence and you cut a hole in it, and let everyone else in. That's kind of what this is. The museum is a repository of great works, but there is certain work that no one ever calls great. This is an insistence on directing their attention to other stuff that's great, that never gets to be in a museum.

As we walked through the National Museum of African American History and Culture, I pushed my grandfather in a wheelchair he had reluctantly agreed to sit in. He is a proud man who also knows that his knees aren't what they once were - that years of high school and college football had long accelerated the deterioration of his aging joints.

Throughout all of human history we have consumed the natural world. All creatures do. Birds do. Fish do. Earthworms do. We consume the natural world as a source of our survival. But no creature has ever consumed at the scale that humans have, and now there are seven billion of us. I think the good news is that a large percentage of those seven billion minds can work to make better decisions.

For my beauty routine, it's kind of complicated. It's not easy at all. I like being natural, but natural is not really natural. To be natural, you need to have really good skin. This is really important.

My form is more on the lines of a Chinese porcelain-jar juggler. They learn it as a child. They learn, learn, learn, learn - but not with a porcelain jar. Then, when they're ready to perform, they're taken to a museum, and they're given a porcelain jar for a lifetime to use. When they're done, it's returned to the museum.

If I had a choice as to my perfect career, I would make a couple of films a year and then concentrate on natural history.

I strongly believe that we can create a poverty-free world, if we want to.... In that kind of world, [the] only place you can see poverty is in the museum. When school children will be on a tour of the poverty museum, they will be horrified to see the misery and indignity of human beings. They will blame their forefathers for tolerating this inhuman condition to continue in a massive way.

Does history warrant the conclusion that religion is necessary to morality - that a natural ethic is too weak to withstand the savagery that lurks under civilization and emerges in our dreams, crimes and wars? ... There is no significant example in history, before our time, of a society successfully maintaining moral life without the aid of religion.

Make the boy interested in natural history if you can; it is better than games; they encourage it in some schools.

I was passionately interested in Elizabethan history at school, so it was natural for me as a musician to take interest in the music of that period.

I've seen things change and people forget: the history of Berlin, the history of queer struggle, the history of AIDS, the history of New York changing from an artistic powerhouse to more of a financial one now.

I look at the natural geological record as a history of the world imperfectly kept and written in a changing dialect; of this history we possess the last volume alone, relating only to two or three countries. Of this volume, only here and there a short chapter has been preserved; and of each page, only here and there a few lines.

History unravels; circumstances, following their natural inclination, prefer to remain ravelled.

Natural Magick is taken to be nothing else, but the chief power of all the natural Sciences; which therefore they call the top and perfection of Natural Philosophy, and which is indeed the active part of the same; which by the assistance of natural forces and faculties, through their mutual & opportune application, performs those things that are above Human Reason.

'Summer of Love: Art of the Psychedelic Era,' the Whitney Museum's 40th-anniversary trip down counterculture memory lane, provides moments of buzzy fun, but it'll leave you only comfortably numb. For starters, it may be the whitest, straightest, most conservative show seen in a New York museum since psychedelia was new.

The French, I think, in general, are strangely prolix in their natural history.

It took the Metropolitan Museum of Art nearly 50 years to wake up to Pablo Picasso. It didn't own one of his paintings until 1946, when Gertrude Stein bequeathed that indomitable quasi-Cubistic picture of herself - a portrait of the writer as a sumo Buddha - to the Met, principally because she disliked the Museum of Modern Art.

The history of successful cases, some of which are in this museum, illustrates that often the regulators and legislatures don't wake up until some plaintiff gets a lawyers and digs out the cover-ups and the incriminating information about a safety defect in an automobile or another product.

I went to art school... but I worked at the Museum of Modern Art. I worked in fundraising at the information membership desk. I ended up, over a period of time, doubling the amount of membership revenue that came in through people entering the museum, so people would ask me to come and work for them.

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 unreal is natural, so natural that it makes of unreality the most natural of anything natural. That is what America does, and that is what America is.

I think where you're born brings a history with it - a cultural history, a mythical history, an ancestral history, a religious context - and certainly influences your perception of the world and how you interpret everyday reality.

He (Shoeless Joe Jackson) was the finest natural hitter in the history of the game.

The use of natural history is to give us aid in supernatural history: the use of the outer creation, to give us language for the beings and changes of the inward creation.

So our building of the visible Church becomes much like any natural business function, using natural means and natural motives.

History is a realm in which human freedom and natural necessity are curiously intermingled.

Natural selection, as it has operated in human history, favors not only the clever but the murderous.

The most profound question is, "What would I risk dying for?" The natural answer is "for my family." But for most of history, we didn't live in families. We lived in small communities that gave us our sense of safety and place in the world, so the natural answer would be "for my people." The blessing and the tragedy of modern life is that we don't need our community to survive anymore. When we lose that idea, we lose a sense of who we are.

Visual surprise is natural in the Caribbean; it comes with the landscape, and faced with its beauty, the sigh of History dissolves.

...It's natural to believe in the supernatural. It never feels natural to accept only natural things.

I wanted to be a part of history and not just a recorder and teacher of history. So that kind of attitude towards history, history itself as a political act, has always informed my writing and my teaching.

I'm hoping that I make readers into museum goers and museum goers into readers.

No rational order of divine intelligence unites species. The natural ties are genealogical along contingent pathways of history.

History is a living horse laughing at a wooden horse. History is a wind blowing where it listeth. History is no sure thing to bet on. History is a box of tricks with a lost key. History is a labyrinth of doors with sliding panels, a book of ciphers with the code in a cave of the Saragossa sea. History says, if it pleases, Excuse me, I beg your pardon, it will never happen again if I can help it.

What's natural and right is to go with the energy of how it all has to work together. What's natural and right is interconnectedness, not individualism. What is natural and right is respect for the system, not killing the system. What's natural and right is love.

My father... never required me to study anything, but he knew how to inspire in me a great desire for knowledge. Before learning to read, my greatest pleasure was to listen to passages from Buffon's natural history. I constantly requested him to read me the history of animals and birds.

I think we may class the lawyer in the natural history of monsters.

Horror is the natural reaction to the last 5,000 years of history.

Hurricane Katrina is without question the worst natural disaster in American history.

This is the kind of stuff me and my friends talk about. We sit around and drink coffee, and we're really angry: We're like, 'Where's the Latino Museum?' Where can we go with our families, where can we go with our friends to learn about our history?

The birds and I share a natural history. It is a matter of rootedness, of living inside a place for so long that the mind and imagination fuse.

I'm noticing a new approach to art making in recent museum and gallery shows. It flickered into focus at the New Museum's 'Younger Than Jesus' last year and ran through the Whitney Biennial, and I'm seeing it blossom and bear fruit at 'Greater New York,' MoMA P.S. 1's twice-a-decade extravaganza of emerging local talent.

...History shows that ... (people) can be deflected from their natural tendencies by artful propaganda, bogus crises, or other political trickery.

When I was sixteen and knew nothing about art, I sat through almost six hours of Andy Warhol’s Empire. I did not understand it but thought: this is in a major museum, it must be important, what is going on here? I stayed until the museum closed. His Screen Test films are some of my favorite works made this century, but you need to give them back the time they took to be made.

I believe that natural history has lost much by the vague general treatment that is so common.

Don't set out to teach theism from your natural history... You spoil both.

Because I'm a walker, natural history is my subject; I've always been obsessed with landscape, and I have an elegiac tone in most of my books.

If I went to somewhere busy, I wouldn't last very long. I can't go to a museum - I'll last 10 or 15 minutes in a museum. The problem is that when one person asks for a photograph, then someone sees a flash goes off, then everyone else sort of... it's sort of like a domino effect.

I'm from Holland and the history of "Admiral" is something you would read about when you're at school. Nobody knows about these stories and when you go to any museum in Holland, you will see these paintings of these 17th century sea beckels that the Dutch were in to, so it always intrigued me.

In the past few decades, Earth's natural systems have endured more pressure than in all preceding human history.

I can pick out people in this city to follow. I can be in a show at the Museum of Modern Art, my space in the Museum of Modern Art is my mailbox, my mail is delivered there. Whenever I want mail, I have to go through this city to get my mail.

It is said that the history of peoples who have a history is the history of class struggle. It might be said with at least as much truthfulness, that the history of peoples without history is a history of their struggle against the state.