John Cage Quotes

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

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

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

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

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

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

In the dark, all cats are black.

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.

Out of the work comes the work.

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

Which is more musical: a truck passing by a factory or a truck passing by a music school?

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I am trying to be unfamiliar with what I'm doing.

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?

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.

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

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

Beware of losing what isn't in your head.

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

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

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

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.

In that case I will devote my life to beating my head against that wall.

In an utter emptiness anything can take place.

Nothing more than nothing can be said.

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

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

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

Everything I see is something I haven't memorized.