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

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

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