John Cage Quotes & Sayings

#1. 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.

John Cage

#2. 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.

John Cage

#3. 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.

John Cage

#4. 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.

John Cage

#5. Now we have come to the end of the part about structure. However, it occurs to me to say more about structure.

John Cage

#6. I don't need sound to talk to me,

John Cage

#7. 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.

John Cage

#8. It is not futile to do what we do. We wake up with energy and we do something. And we make, of course, failures and we make mistakes, but we sometimes get glimpses of what we might do next.

John Cage

#9. 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.

John Cage

#10. 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.

John Cage

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

John Cage

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

John Cage

#13. 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?

John Cage

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

John Cage

#15. I have nothing to say
and I am saying it
and that is poetry
as I need it.

John Cage

#16. 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.

John Cage

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

John Cage

#18. Whereas what we need is to fumble around in the darkness, because that's where our lives (not necessarily all of the time, but at least some of the time, and particularly when life gets problematical for us) takes place.

John Cage

#19. 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.

John Cage

#20. Everyday is a beautiful day, Everything is pleasing

John Cage

#21. 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.

John Cage

#22. A finished work is exactly that, requires resurrection.

John Cage

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

John Cage

#24. 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.

John Cage

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

John Cage

#26. There is nothing we need to do that isn't dangerous.

John Cage

#27. We carry our homes within us which enables us to fly.

John Cage

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

John Cage

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

John Cage

#30. The reason we life black people isn't because they're black. We like them because they're not as grey as we are.

John Cage

#31. 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.

John Cage

#32. 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?

John Cage

#33. The world is teeming; anything can happen.

John Cage

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

John Cage

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

John Cage

#36. 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.

John Cage

#37. Why is it that children, taught the names of the months and the fact that there are twelve of them, don't ask why the ninth is called the seventh (September), the tenth called the eight (October), the eleventh called the ninth (November), the twelfth called the tenth (December)?

John Cage

#38. Be happy whenever you can manage it. Enjoy yourself. It's lighter than you think.

John Cage

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

John Cage

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

John Cage

#41. We only hear what we listen for.

John Cage

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

John Cage

#43. The attitude I take is that everyday life is more interesting than forms of celebration, when we become aware of it. That when is when our intentions go down to zero. Then suddenly you notice that the world is magical.

John Cage

#44. I haven't been to a movie for three months of Sundays. I gather from what Carolyn reports that Hollywood now produces false entertainment: unmitigated violence on the screen; snickering, laughter in the audience.

John Cage

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

John Cage

#46. In an utter emptiness anything can take place.

John Cage

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

John Cage

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

John Cage

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

John Cage

#50. Everything you do is music, and everywhere is the best seat.

John Cage

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

John Cage

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

John Cage

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

John Cage

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

John Cage

#55. 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.

John Cage

#56. Syntax, like government, can only be obeyed. It is
therefore of no use except when you
have something particular to command
such as: Go buy me a bunch of carrots.

John Cage

#57. Each moment presents what happens.

John Cage

#58. Sleep's what we need. It produces an emptiness in us into which sooner or later energies flow.

John Cage

#59. Computer mistake in grade-giving resulted in academic failure of several brilliant students. After some years the mistake was discovered. Letter was sent to each student inviting him to resume his studies. Each replied he was getting along very well without education.

John Cage

#60. 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.'

John Cage

#61. Everything we do is Music

John Cage

#62. 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.

John Cage

#63. The important questions are answered by not liking only but disliking and accepting equally what one likes and dislikes. Otherwise there is no access to the dark night of the soul.

John Cage

#64. 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.

John Cage

#65. Power and profit structures're out of cahoots with current technology. Aware of new inventions, corporations put them aside, waiting for competitive reasons until they're obliged to use new gimmicks.

John Cage

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

John Cage

#67. There's nothing we really need to do that isn't dangerous

John Cage

#68. We make our lives by what we love.

John Cage

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

John Cage

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

John Cage

#71. Why make art ? To quiet the mind thus making it susceptible to divine influences.

John Cage

#72. 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.

John Cage

#73. Every something is an echo of nothing

John Cage

#74. 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.

John Cage

#75. My favorite music is the music I haven't yet heard

John Cage

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

John Cage

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

John Cage

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

John Cage

#79. We, the garden of technology. We, undecidable.

John Cage

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

John Cage

#81. Whether I make them or not, there are always sounds to be heard and all of them are excellent.

John Cage

#82. I discovered that those who seldom dwell on their emotions know better than anyone else just what an emotion is.

John Cage

#83. Things we were going to do are now being done by others. They were, it seems, not in our minds to do (were we or they out of our minds?) but simply ready to enter any open mind, any mind disturbed enough not to have an idea in it.

John Cage

#84. Veblen called it the price-system. Mills called it the Power Elite. It's probably no more than ninety-nine people who don't know what they are doing. They're involved in high finance. Fascinating form of gambling.

John Cage

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

John Cage

#86. 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?

John Cage

#87. 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.

John Cage

#88. 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.

John Cage

#89. The emotions - love, mirth, the heroic, wonder, tranquility, fear, anger, sorrow, disgust - are in the audience.

John Cage

#90. Valda said that if you change your residence every six months you can legally free your children from compulsory education.

John Cage

#91. In the dark, all cats are black.

John Cage

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

John Cage

#93. Music is a means of rapid transportation.

John Cage

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

John Cage

#95. 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.

John Cage