John Cage Quotes - Page 5

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

When we separate music from life we get is art.

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

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

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.

We're breaking all of the rules, even our own rules, and how do we do that? By leaving plenty of room for X quantities.

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

Try as we may to make a silence, we cannot.

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

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.

Paper should be edible, nutritious. Inks used for printing or writing should have delicious flavors. Magazines or newspapers read at breakfast should be eaten for lunch. Instead of throwing one's mail in the waste-basket, it should be saved for the dinner guests.

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

Everything we do is music." (Classical Composer)(From: 4'33")

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.

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

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

Some people take music too seriously, and some don't take it seriously enough, others take it just right.

One need not fear for the future of music.

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

Theatre takes place all the time - wherever one is - and art simply facilitates persuading one this is the case.

Everything I see is something I haven't memorized.

A sound does not view itself as thought, as ought, as needing another sound for its elucidation, as etc.; it has not time for any consideration--it is occupied with the performance of its characteristics: before it has died away it must have made perfectly exact its frequency, its loudness, its length, its overtone structure, the precise morphology of these and of itself.

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.

If there are questions then, of course, there are answers, but the final answer makes the questions seem absurd.

You can feel an emotion; just don't think that it's so important.