That which, perhaps, hears more nonsense than anything in the world, is a picture in a museum. – Edmond de Goncourt

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. – G. K. Chesterton

I never can pass by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York without thinking of it not as a gallery of living portraits but as a cemetery of tax-deductible wealth. – Lewis H. Lapham