John Cage Quotes

65 Sourced Quotes

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

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

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

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

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

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

John Cage
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.

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

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
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.

John Cage
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.

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

John Cage
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.

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

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

John Cage
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
Our business in living is to become fluent with the life we are living, and art can help this.

John Cage
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
There is poetry as soon as we realize that we possess nothing.

John Cage
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
I am trying to check my habits of seeing, to counter them for the sake of greater freshness. I am trying to be unfamiliar with what I'm doing.

John Cage