Top 148 Quotes & Sayings by John Cage
Explore popular quotes and sayings by an American composer John Cage.
Last updated on September 16, 2024.
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.
The highest purpose is to have no purpose at all. This puts one in accord with nature, in her manner of operation.
We need not destroy the past. It is gone.
I have nothing to say, I am saying it, and that is poetry.
Ideas are one thing and what happens is another.
There is poetry as soon as we realize that we possess nothing.
We carry our homes within us which enables us to fly.
It's useless to play lullabies for those who cannot sleep.
When we separate music from life we get art.
I can't understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I'm frightened of the old ones.
The first question I ask myself when something doesn't seem to be beautiful is why do I think it's not beautiful. And very shortly you discover that there is no reason.
There is no such thing as an empty space or an empty time. There is always something to see, something to hear. In fact, try as we may to make a silence, we cannot.
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.'
We are involved in a life that passes understanding and our highest business is our daily life.
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?
Music is a means of rapid transportation.
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.
Good music can act as a guide to good living.
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.’
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.
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.
My favorite piece [piece of music] is the one we hear all the time if we are quiet.
Our business in living is to become fluent with the life we are living, and art can help this.
Whether I make them or not, there are always sounds to be heard and all of them are excellent.
A meal without mushrooms is like a day without rain.
I have nothing to say, and I am saying it.
The purpose of music is to sober and quiet the mind, thus making it susceptible to divine influences.
As far as consistency of thought goes, I prefer inconsistency.
What right do I have to be in the woods, if the woods are not in me.
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.
Not one sound fears the silence that extinguishes it. And no silence exists that is not pregnant with sound.
My favorite music is the music I haven't yet heard
I am trying to be unfamiliar with what I'm doing.
Our intention is to affirm this life, not to bring order out of chaos, nor to suggest improvements in creation, but simply to wake up to the very life we're living, which is so excellent once one gets one's mind and desires out of its way and lets it act of it's own accord.
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.
Get yourself out of whatever cage you find yourself in.
Everything you do is music, and everywhere is the best seat.
Now that we have everything we need, we discover that there is almost nothing that we have that we want
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.
I like being moved. I don't like being pushed.
There's no such thing as silence. Something is always happening that makes a sound.
It is not irritating to be where one is. It is only irritating to think one would like to be somewhere else.
To accept whatever comes, regardless of the consequences, is to be unafraid.
All great art is a form of complaint
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.
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.
My work became an exploration of non-intention.
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.
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.
The material of music is sound and silence. Integrating these is composing.
Art is whatever you can get away with.
Value judgments are destructive to our proper business, which is curiosity and awareness.
Art's purpose is to sober and quiet the mind so that it is in accord with what happens.
If my work is accepted, I must move on to the point where it is not.
One shouldn't go to the woods looking for something, but rather to see what is there.
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.
I was shocked at college to see one hundred of my classmates in the library all reading copies of the same book. Instead of doing as they did, I went into the stacks and read the first book written by an author whose name began with Z. I received the highest grade in the class. That convinced me that the institution was not being run correctly. I left.
The act of listening is in fact an act of composing.
If you develop an ear for sounds that are musical it is like developing an ego. You begin to refuse sounds that are not musical and that way cut yourself off from a good deal of experience.
Every something is an echo of nothing
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