100+ John Cage Quotes | InspiringQuotes.us

source: - "Happy Birthday, John Cage! Celebrate What Would Be The Composer’s 101st With His Little-Seen Visual Art" by Kate Abbey-Lambertz, www.huffingtonpost.com. September 5, 2013.

Topics: Beauty, Beautiful, Reality

If something is boring after two minutes, try it for four. If still boring, then eight. Then sixteen. Then thirty-two. Eventually one discovers that it is not boring at all.

Topics: Inspirational, Music, Two

Music is edifying, for from time to time it sets the soul in operation.

Topics: Soul, Operations, Music Is

I believe the use of noise to make music will increase until we reach a music produced through the aid of electrical instruments which will make available for musical purposes any and all sounds that can be heard.

Topics: Believe, Musical, Use

Get yourself out of whatever cage you find yourself in.

Topics: Finding Yourself, Cages

It is better to make a piece of music than to perform one, better to perform one than to listen to one, better to listen to one than to misuse it as a means of distraction, entertainment, or acquisition of 'culture.'

Topics: Mean, Listening, Entertainment

In the dark, all cats are black.

Topics: Cat, Dark, Black

Which is more musical, a truck passing by a factory or a truck passing by a music school? Are the people inside the school musical and the ones outside unmusical? What if the ones inside can't hear very well, would that change my question?

Topics: School, People, Musical

Our poetry now is the realization that we possess nothing. Anything therefore is a delight (since we do not posses it) and thus need not fear its loss.

Topics: Loss, Poetry, Needs

People who aren't artists often feel that artists are inspired. But if you work at your art you don't have time to be inspired.

Topics: Art, Inspiration, People

Music is a means of rapid transportation.

Topics: Music, Mean, Rapids

Wherever we are, what we hear is mostly noise. When we ignore it, it disturbs us. When we listen to it, we find it fascinating.

source: - John Cage (2010). “Silence: Lectures and Writings”, p.17, Wesleyan University Press

Topics: Music, Peace, Noise

Art is whatever you can get away with.

Topics: Art, Get Away, Art Is

The material of music is sound and silence. Integrating these is composing.

source: - Pierre Boulez, Jean-Jacques Nattiez, John Cage, Robert Samuels (1995). “The Boulez-Cage Correspondence”, p.38, Cambridge University Press

Topics: Silence, Sound, Integrating

When you start working, everybody is in your studio- the past, your friends, enemies, the art world, and above all, your own ideas- all are there. But as you continue painting, they start leaving, one by one, and you are left completely alone. Then, if you are lucky, even you leave.

Topics: Art, Past, Ideas, Friend Enemy

Look at everything. Don't close your eyes to the world around you. Look and become curious and interested in what there is to see.

Topics: Grateful, Eye, Looks

The Indians long ago knew that music was going on permanently and that hearing it was like looking out a window at a landscape which didn't stop when one turned away.

source: - John Cage (2010). “A Year from Monday: New Lectures and Writings”, p.122, Wesleyan University Press

Topics: Long Ago, Landscape, Hearing

The highest purpose is to have no purpose at all. This puts one in accord with nature, in her manner of operation.

source: - John Cage (2010). “Silence: Lectures and Writings”, p.55, Wesleyan University Press

Topics: Purpose, Operations, Accord

Don't try to create and analyze at the same time. They're different processes.

Topics: Trying, Different, Process

Not one sound fears the silence that extinguishes it. And no silence exists that is not pregnant with sound.

Topics: Silence, Sound, Pregnant

The purpose of music is to sober and quiet the mind, thus making it susceptible to divine influences.

source: - "Music Age".

Topics: Art, Mind, Quiet

My favorite music is the music I haven't yet heard

Topics: My Favorite, Music Is, Heard, Favorite Music

My favorite piece [piece of music] is the one we hear all the time if we are quiet.

source: - "John Cage".

Topics: Pieces, Quiet, My Favorite

There's no such thing as silence. Something is always happening that makes a sound.

Topics: Silence, Sound, Happenings

The world, the real is not an object. It is a process.

source: - John Cage, Daniel Charles (1981). “For the birds”, Marion Boyars Publishers Ltd

Topics: Real, World, Process

There was a German philosopher who is very well known, his name was Immanuel Kant, and he said there are two things that don’t have to mean anything, one is music and the other is laughter. Don’t have to mean anything that is, in order to give us deep pleasure.

Topics: Laughter, Mean, Order, German Philosopher

The world is no longer a romantic place; some of its people still are however, and therein lies the promise. Don't let the world win.

Topics: Dream, Lying, Winning, Ally Mcbeal

If my work is accepted, I must move on to the point where it is not.

Topics: Moving, Accepted, Ifs

I like being moved. I don't like being pushed.

Topics: Interesting, Moved

What right do I have to be in the woods, if the woods are not in me.

Topics: Nature, Woods, Ifs

...we make our lives by what we love.

source: - John Cage (1961). “Silence: Lectures and Writings”, p.114, Wesleyan University Press

Topics: Live By, Our Lives

A meal without mushrooms is like a day without rain.

source: - John Cage (2010). “A Year from Monday: New Lectures and Writings”, p.60, Wesleyan University Press

Topics: Rain, Mushrooms, Meals

My favourite music is the music I haven't yet heard. I don't hear the music I write: I write in order to hear the music I haven't yet heard.

Topics: Writing, Order, Favourite

If this word "music" is sacred and reserved for eighteenth and nineteenth century instruments, we can substitute a more meaningful term: organization of sound.

source: - John Cage (2011). “Silence: Lectures and Writings, 50th Anniversary Edition”, Wesleyan University Press

Topics: Music, Meaningful, Organization

What I'm proposing, to myself and other people, is what I often call the tourist attitude - that you act as though you've never been there before. So that you're not supposed to know anything about it. If you really get down to brass tacks, we have never been anywhere before.

source: - "Musicage: Cage Muses on Words, Art, Music". Book by John Cage, January, 1996.

Topics: Attitude, People, Tourists

The world is teeming; anything can happen.

source: - John Cage (2010). “Silence: Lectures and Writings”, p.110, Wesleyan University Press

Topics: World, Anything Can Happen, Happens

To see, one must go beyond the imiagination and for that one must stand absolutely still as though at the center of a leap.

source: - John Cage (2011). “Silence: Lectures and Writings, 50th Anniversary Edition”, Wesleyan University Press

Topics: Leap, Stills

After I had been studying with him for two years, Schoenberg said, ‘In order to write music, you must have a feeling for harmony.’ I explained to him that I had no feeling for harmony. He then said that I would always encounter an obstacle, that it would be as though I came to a wall through which I could not pass. I said, ‘In that case I will devote my life to beating my head against that wall.’

Topics: Wall, Writing, Order, Schoenberg

Art is sort of an experimental station in which one tries out living.

source: - John Cage (2010). “Silence: Lectures and Writings”, p.39, Wesleyan University Press

Topics: Art, Design, Trying

One shouldn't go to the woods looking for something, but rather to see what is there.

Topics: Woods

An error is simply a failure to adjust immediately from a preconception to an actuality.

source: - Silence 1961 45' for a Speaker

Topics: Errors, Events, Actuality

Now that we have everything we need, we discover that there is almost nothing that we have that we want

source: - John Cage (2010). “M: Writings ’67–’72”, p.205, Wesleyan University Press

Topics: Money, Needs, Want

A mind that is interested in changing...is interested precisely in the things that are at extremes. I'm certainly like that. Unless we go to extremes, we won't get anywhere.

Topics: Change, Mind, Extremes

What is the purpose of writing music? One is, of course, not dealing with purposes but dealing with sounds. Or the answer must take the form of a paradox: a purposeful purposeless or a purposeless play. This play, however, is an affirmation of life--not an attempt to bring order out of chaos nor to suggest improvements in creation, but simply a way of waking up to the very life we’re living, which is so excellent once one gets one’s mind and one’s desires out of its way and lets it act of its own accord.

Topics: Writing, Order, Play, Purpose Of Writing

A 'mistake' is beside the point, for once anything happens it authentically is.

source: - Pierre Boulez, Jean-Jacques Nattiez, John Cage, Robert Samuels (1995). “The Boulez-Cage Correspondence”, p.107, Cambridge University Press

Topics: Music, Mistake, Happens

An artist conscientiously moves in a direction which for some good reason he takes, putting one work in front of the other with the hope he'll arrive before death overtakes him.

source: - John Cage (2011). “Silence: Lectures and Writings, 50th Anniversary Edition”, Wesleyan University Press

Topics: Art, Moving, Before Death

Let no one imagine that in owning a recording he has the music. The very practice of music is a celebration that we own nothing.

source: - John Cage (2010). “Silence: Lectures and Writings”, p.28, Wesleyan University Press

Topics: Music, Practice, Singing

All I know about method is that when I am not working I sometimes think I know something, but when I am working, it is quite clear I know nothing.

source: - John Cage (2011). “Silence: Lectures and Writings, 50th Anniversary Edition”, p.18, Wesleyan University Press

Topics: Thinking, Sometimes, Method

To accept whatever comes, regardless of the consequences, is to be unafraid.

Topics: Courage, Accepting, Unafraid

Out of the work comes the work.

Topics: Work

We are involved in a life that passes understanding and our highest business is our daily life.

Topics: Life, Understanding, Involved

Why do you not do as I do? Letting go of your thoughts as though they were the cold ashes of a long dead fire?

source: - John Cage (2010). “Silence: Lectures and Writings”, p.59, Wesleyan University Press

Topics: Letting Go, Fire, Long

My work became an exploration of non-intention.

source: - John Cage, Richard Kostelanetz (1993). “John Cage, writer: previously uncollected pieces”, Amadeus Press

Topics: Exploration, Intention

When you make music you are acting as a philosopher. You can either do that consciously or you can do it unconsciously, but you're doing it.

Topics: Acting, Philosopher, Can Do

The function of Art is to imitate Nature in her manner of operation. Our understanding of her manner of operation&Rdquo; changes according to advances in the sciences.

Topics: Art, Nature, Science

When I hear what we call music, it seems to me that someone is talking. And talking about his feelings, or about his ideas of relationships. But when I hear traffic, the sound of traffic - here on Sixth Avenue, for instance - I don’t have the feeling that anyone is talking. I have the feeling that sound is acting. And I love the activity of sound... I don’t need sound to talk to me.

source: - Interview with Miroslav Sebestik (1991), as quoted in Miroslav Sebestik's documentary "Listen" (ARTE France Developpement), 2003.

Topics: Talking, Ideas, Feelings

I remember loving sound before I ever took a music lesson. And so we make our lives by what we love.

source: - John Cage (2011). “Silence: Lectures and Writings, 50th Anniversary Edition”, Wesleyan University Press

Topics: Sound, Lessons, Remember, Music Lessons

I imagine that as contemporary music goes on changing in the way that I'm changing it what will be done is to more and more completely liberate sounds from abstract ideas about them and more and more exactly to let them be physically uniquely themselves. This means for me: knowing more and more not what I think a sound is but what it actually is in all of its acoustical details and then letting this sound exist, itself, changing in a changing sonorous environment.

source: - "Classic Essays on Twentieth-Century Music". Book by Richard Kostelanetz, 1952.

Topics: Mean, Thinking, Ideas, Knowing More, Contemporary Music

In the nature of the use of chance operations is the belief that all answers answer all questions.

source: - John Cage (1997). “I–VI: MethodStructureIntentionDisciplineNotationIndeterminacyInterpenetrationImitationDevotionCircumstancesVariableStructureNonunderstandingContingencyInconsistencyPerformance”, p.456, Wesleyan University Press

Topics: Use, Answers, Chance

The responsibility of the artist consists in perfecting his work so that it may become attractively disinteresting.

source: - John Cage (2011). “Silence: Lectures and Writings, 50th Anniversary Edition”, Wesleyan University Press

Topics: Responsibility, Artist, May

The white paintings came first; my silent piece came later.

source: - John Cage (2010). “Silence: Lectures and Writings”, p.112, Wesleyan University Press

Topics: White, Pieces, Firsts

There will always be critics eager to fashion opinions for the lazy and incapable.

Topics: Fashion, Lazy, Opinion

I never had a hat, never wore one, but recently was given a brown suede duck-hunting hat. The moment I put it on I realized I was starved for a hat. I kept it warm by putting it on my head. I made plans to wear it especially when I was going to do any thinking. Somewhere in Virginia, I lost my hat.

source: - John Cage (2010). “A Year from Monday: New Lectures and Writings”, p.116, Wesleyan University Press

Topics: Thinking, Hunting, Ducks, Duck Hunting

People paying attention to vibratory activity, not in reaction to a fixed ideal performance, but each time attentively to how it happens to be this time, not necessarily two times the same. A music that transports the listener to the moment where he is.

source: - "John Cage: An Autobiographical Statement". www.johncage.org. April 17, 1990.

Topics: Two, People, Attention

If you don't have enough time to accomplish something, consider the work finished once it's begun.

Topics: Work, Enough Time, Time Management

Where does beauty begin? Where does it end? Where it ends is where the artist begins.

source: - John Cage (2010). “Silence: Lectures and Writings”, p.8, Wesleyan University Press

Topics: Beauty, Artist, Doe

It's useless to play lullabies for those who cannot sleep.

source: - John Cage (2010). “M: Writings ’67–’72”, p.15, Wesleyan University Press

Topics: Sleep, Play, Useless, Lullaby

Discord occasions a momentary distress to the ear, which remains unsatisfied, and even uneasy, until it hears something better. I am convinced...that provided the ear be at length made amends, there are few dissonances too strong for it. Disharmony, to paraphrase Bergson's statement about disorder, is simply a harmony to which many are unaccustomed.

Topics: Music, Strong, Ears, Disharmony, Dissonance

We are not committed to this or that. We are committed to the nothing in-between, whether we know it or not.

source: - John Cage (2010). “A Year from Monday: New Lectures and Writings”, p.119, Wesleyan University Press

Topics: Committed, Knows

There are some good people in it, but the orchestra as a whole is equivalent to a gang bent on destruction.

Topics: People, Orchestra, Gang

I want to change my way of seeing, NOT my way of feeling. I was perfectly happy about my feelings.

Topics: Feelings, Want, Way

In an utter emptiness anything can take place.

source: - John Cage (2011). “Silence: Lectures and Writings, 50th Anniversary Edition”, Wesleyan University Press

Topics: Emptiness

College: two hundred people reading the same book. An obvious mistake. Two hundred people can read two hundred books.

source: - John Cage (2010). “M: Writings ’67–’72”, p.61, Wesleyan University Press

Topics: Mistake, Book, Reading

It was at Harvard not quite forty years ago that I went into an anechoic [totally silent] chamber not expecting in that silent room to hear two sounds: one high, my nervous system in operation, one low, my blood in circulation. The reason I did not expect to hear those two sounds was that they were set into vibration without any intention on my part. That experience gave my life direction, the exploration of nonintention. No one else was doing that. I would do it for us. I did not know immediately what I was doing, nor, after all these years, have I found out much. I compose music.

Topics: Blood, Years, Two, Life Direction

I certainly had no feeling for harmony, and Schoenberg thought that that would make it impossible for me to write music. He said, 'You'll come to a wall you won't be able to get through.' So I said, 'I'll beat my head against that wall.'

source: - Observer magazine Interview, 1982.

Topics: Wall, Writing, Feelings, Schoenberg

Nothing more than nothing can be said.

source: - John Cage (2011). “Silence: Lectures and Writings, 50th Anniversary Edition”, Wesleyan University Press

Topics: Said

When we separate music from life we get is art.

source: - "Silence: Lectures and Writings".

Topics: Art, Separation

We only hear what we listen for.

Artists talk a lot about freedom. So, recalling the expression "free as a bird," Morton Feldman went to a park one day and spent some time watching our feathered friends. When he came back, he said, "You know? They're not free: they're fighting over bits of food.

source: - John Cage (2010). “Silence: Lectures and Writings”, p.165, Wesleyan University Press

Topics: Fighting, Artist, Expression

All God's religions ... have not been able to put mankind back together again.

source: - John Cage (2010). “M: Writings ’67–’72”, p.83, Wesleyan University Press

Topics: Together Again, Religion, Able, Back Together, Back Together Again

Everything we do is music." (Classical Composer)(From: 4'33")

Topics: Composer, Classical Composers

For myself and my own experience now, I don't really need any music. I have enough to listen to with just the sounds of the environment. I listen to the sounds of 6th avenue.

Topics: Sound, Needs, Environment

Paper should be edible, nutritious. Inks used for printing or writing should have delicious flavors. Magazines or newspapers read at breakfast should be eaten for lunch. Instead of throwing one's mail in the waste-basket, it should be saved for the dinner guests.

source: - John Cage (2010). “M: Writings ’67–’72”, p.115, Wesleyan University Press

Topics: Writing, Lunch, Should Have, Dinner Guests

With just one musician, you can really do an unlimited number of things on the inside of the piano, if you have at your disposal an exploded keyboard.

Topics: Piano, Numbers, Musician

One need not fear for the future of music.

Topics: Needs

If someone says can't, that shows you what to do.

source: - John Cage, Richard Kostelanetz (1993). “John Cage, writer: previously uncollected pieces”, Amadeus Press

Topics: Challenges, Possibility, Shows

Composing for the prepared piano is not a criticism of the instrument. I'm only being practical.

Topics: Music, Piano, Criticism

Each something is a celebration of the nothing that supports it.

source: - John Cage (2011). “Silence: Lectures and Writings, 50th Anniversary Edition”, Wesleyan University Press

Topics: Support, Celebration

Some people take music too seriously, and some don't take it seriously enough, others take it just right.

Topics: People, Enough

The grand thing about the human mind is that it can turn its own tables and see meaninglessness as ultimate meaning.

source: - John Cage (2011). “Silence: Lectures and Writings, 50th Anniversary Edition”, Wesleyan University Press

Topics: Mind, Tables, Turns, Meaninglessness

Theatre takes place all the time - wherever one is - and art simply facilitates persuading one this is the case.

source: - John Cage (1961). “Silence: Lectures and Writings”, p.174, Wesleyan University Press

Topics: Art, Theatre, Cases, Persuading

Everything I see is something I haven't memorized.

Topics: Havens

A sound does not view itself as thought, as ought, as needing another sound for its elucidation, as etc.; it has not time for any consideration--it is occupied with the performance of its characteristics: before it has died away it must have made perfectly exact its frequency, its loudness, its length, its overtone structure, the precise morphology of these and of itself.

source: - John Cage (2010). “Silence: Lectures and Writings”, p.28, Wesleyan University Press

Topics: Views, Sound, Doe, Morphology

When I went to the analyst for a kind of preliminary meeting, he said, 'I'll be able to fix you so that you'll write much more music than you do now.' I said, 'Good heavens! I already write too much, it seems to me.' That promise of his put me off.

source: - John Cage (2010). “Silence: Lectures and Writings”, p.27, Wesleyan University Press

Topics: Writing, Heaven, Promise

As McLuhan says, everything happens at once.

source: - John Cage (2010). “A Year from Monday: New Lectures and Writings”, p.4, Wesleyan University Press

Topics: Happens, Things Happen

Combine nursing homes with nursery schools. Bring very old and very young together: they interest one another.

source: - John Cage (2010). “M: Writings ’67–’72”, p.22, Wesleyan University Press

Topics: Home, School, Nursing, Nursery School, Nursing Home

We are living in a period in which many people have changed their mind about what the use of music is or could be for them. Something that doesn't speak or talk like a human being, that doesn't know its definition in the dictionary or its theory in the schools, that expresses itself simply by the fact of its vibrations. People paying attention to vibratory activity, not in reaction to a fixed ideal performance, but each time attentively to how it happens to be this time, not necessarily two times the same. A music that transports the listener to the moment where he is.

source: - "Autobiographical Statement". www.johncage.org. April 1990.

Topics: Music, School, Two

No one can have an idea once he starts really listening.

source: - John Cage (2010). “Silence: Lectures and Writings”, p.91, Wesleyan University Press

Topics: Ideas, Listening

So somebody has talent? So what? Dime a dozen. And we're overpopulated. Actually we have more food than we have people and more art. We've gotten to the point of burning food. When will we begin to burn our art?

source: - John Cage (2010). “Silence: Lectures and Writings”, p.1, Wesleyan University Press

Topics: Art, People, Dimes

A finished work is exactly that, requires resurrection.

source: - John Cage (2010). “Silence: Lectures and Writings”, p.78, Wesleyan University Press

Topics: Music, Resurrection, Finished Work

You can feel an emotion; just don't think that it's so important.

source: - John Cage, Daniel Charles (1981). “For the birds”, Marion Boyars Publishers Ltd

Topics: Thinking, Important, Emotion

I don't need sound to talk to me.

source: - Interview with Miroslav Sebestik, 1991.

Topics: Sound, Needs, Talk To Me

If there are questions then, of course, there are answers, but the final answer makes the questions seem absurd.

source: - John Cage (2011). “Silence: Lectures and Writings, 50th Anniversary Edition”, Wesleyan University Press

Topics: Finals, Answers, Absurd

Until I die there will be sounds. And they will continue following my death. One need not fear about the future of music.

source: - John Cage (2010). “Silence: Lectures and Writings”, p.22, Wesleyan University Press

Topics: Sound, Needs, Following

Food, one assumes, provides nourishment; but Americans eat it fully aware that small amounts of poison have been added to improve its appearance and delay its putrefaction.

source: - John Cage (2010). “Silence: Lectures and Writings”, p.164, Wesleyan University Press

Topics: Food, Cooking, Delay, Nourishment, Small Amounts

One day when I was studying with Schoenberg, he pointed out the eraser on his pencil and said, 'This end is more important than the other.' After twenty years I learned to write directly in ink.

source: - John Cage (2011). “Silence: Lectures and Writings, 50th Anniversary Edition”, Wesleyan University Press

Topics: Mistake, Writing, Years, Schoenberg, Erasers

Percussion music is revolution. Sound and rhythm have too long been submissive to the restrictions of nineteenth century music. Today we are fighting for their emancipation. Tomorrow, with electronic music in our ears, we will hear freedom. At the present stage of revolution, a healthy lawlessness is warranted. Experiment must necessarily be carried on by hitting anything-tin pans, rice bowls, iron pipes-anything we can lay our hands on. Not only hitting, but rubbing, scraping, making sound in every possible way...What we can't do ourselves will be done by machines which we will invent.

Topics: Music, Fighting, Hands, Percussion, Scraping

I needed another basis for musical structure. This I found in sound's duration parameter, sound's only parameter which is present even when no sound is intended.

source: - John Cage (2010). “M: Writings ’67–’72”, p.153, Wesleyan University Press

Topics: Musical, Sound, Duration, Parameters

The truth is that everything causes everything else. We do not speak therefore of one thing causing another. There are no secrets. It's just we thought they said dead when they said bread.

source: - "A Year from Monday: New Lectures and Writings".

Topics: Death, Food, Justice

Everyday is a beautiful day, Everything is pleasing

Topics: Beautiful, Hippie, Beautiful Day

Guy Nearing told us it's a good idea when hunting mushrooms to have a pleasant goal, a waterfall for instance, and, having reached it, to return another way. When, however, we're obliged to go and come back by the same path, returning we notice mushrooms we hadn't noticed going out.

source: - John Cage (2012). “El libro de las setas”, p.56, Univ de Castilla La Mancha

Topics: Hunting, Mushrooms, Ideas

We are simple-minded enough to think that if we were saying something we would use words. We are rather doing something. The meaning of what we do is determined by each one who sees and hears it.

source: - John Cage (2010). “Silence: Lectures and Writings”, p.108, Wesleyan University Press

Topics: Simple, Thinking, Use

Now that things are so simple, there's so much to do.

source: - John Cage (2011). “Silence: Lectures and Writings, 50th Anniversary Edition”, Wesleyan University Press

Topics: Simple

Each moment presents what happens.

source: - John Cage (2010). “A Year from Monday: New Lectures and Writings”, p.107, Wesleyan University Press

Topics: Moments, Happens

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