John Cage Quotes

65 Sourced Quotes

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

John Cage
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.

John Cage
I can't understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I'm frightened of the old ones.

John Cage
I have nothing to say/ and I am saying it/ and that is poetry/ as I need it.

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

John Cage
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.'

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

John Cage
Art's purpose is to sober and quiet the mind so that it is in accord with what happens.

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

John Cage
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.

John Cage
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.' I said, 'Well then, I'll beat my head against that wall.' I quite literally began hitting things, and developed a music of percussion that involved noises.

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

John Cage
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. The sound of a truck at fifty miles per hour. Static between the stations. Rain. We want to capture and control these sounds, to use them not as sound effects but as musical instruments. Every film studio has a library of "sound effects" recorded on film. With a film phonograph it is now possible to control the amplitude and frequency of any one of these sounds and to give to it rhythms within or beyond the reach of the imagination. Given four film phonographs, we can compose and perform a quartet for explosive motor, wind, heartbeat, and landslide.

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

John Cage
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?

John Cage
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
Value judgments are destructive to our proper business, which is curiosity and awareness.

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

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

John Cage
The composer (organizer of sound) will be faced not only with the entire field of sound but also with the entire field of time. The 'frame' or fraction of a second, following established film technique, will probably be the basic unit in the measurement of time. No rhythm will be beyond the composer's reach.

John Cage
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.

John Cage