John Cage Quotes - Page 3

People who aren't artists often feel that artists are inspired. But if you work at your art you don't have time to be inspired.

All great art is a form of complaint

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.

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

What is the purpose of writing music? One is, of course, not dealing with purposes but dealing with sounds. Or the answer must take the form of a paradox: a purposeful purposeless or a purposeless play. This play, however, is an affirmation of life--not an attempt to bring order out of chaos nor to suggest improvements in creation, but simply a way of waking up to the very life we’re living, which is so excellent once one gets one’s mind and one’s desires out of its way and lets it act of its own accord.

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.

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

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

If this word "music" is sacred and reserved for eighteenth and nineteenth century instruments, we can substitute a more meaningful term: organization of sound.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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?

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?

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

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

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.

I imagine that as contemporary music goes on changing in the way that I'm changing it what will be done is to more and more completely liberate sounds from abstract ideas about them and more and more exactly to let them be physically uniquely themselves. This means for me: knowing more and more not what I think a sound is but what it actually is in all of its acoustical details and then letting this sound exist, itself, changing in a changing sonorous environment.

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

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