John Cage Quotes - Page 2

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.

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

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.

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

Every something is an echo of nothing

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

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

Music is a means of rapid transportation.

Good music can act as a guide to good living.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

We need not destroy the past. It is gone.

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

A meal without mushrooms is like a day without rain.

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.’

It is not irritating to be where one is. It is only irritating to think one would like to be somewhere else.

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

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.'

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