Quote

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.

John Cage

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

John Cage
Age: 79 †
Born: 1912
Born: September 5
Died: 1992
Died: August 2
Composer
Illustrator
Music Theorist
Musician
Musicologist
Painter
Philosopher
Poet
University Teacher
Writer
LA
California
John Milton Cage Jr.
John Milton Cage
Jr.
John Milton
Jr. Cage
J. C.
Firsts
Question
First
Beauty
Something
Asks
Think
Doesn
Thinking
Reality
Beautiful
Shortly
Seems
Discover
Reason
Seem

More quotes by John Cage

Image
As far as consistency of thought goes, I prefer inconsistency.
John Cage
Image
Be happy whenever you can manage it. Enjoy yourself. It's lighter than you think.
John Cage
Image
There is poetry as soon as we realize that we possess nothing.
John Cage
Image
Until I die there will be sounds. And they will continue following my death. One need not fear about the future of music.
John Cage
Image
To accept whatever comes, regardless of the consequences, is to be unafraid.
John Cage
Image
People paying attention to vibratory activity, not in reaction to a fixed ideal performance, but each time attentively to how it happens to be this time, not necessarily two times the same. A music that transports the listener to the moment where he is.
John Cage
Image
In the dark, all cats are black.
John Cage
Image
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.
John Cage
Image
Food, one assumes, provides nourishment but Americans eat it fully aware that small amounts of poison have been added to improve its appearance and delay its putrefaction.
John Cage
Image
The function of Art is to imitate Nature in her manner of operation. Our understanding of her manner of operation&Rdquo changes according to advances in the sciences.
John Cage
Image
If this word music is sacred and reserved for eighteenth and nineteenth century instruments, we can substitute a more meaningful term: organization of sound.
John Cage
Image
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.
John Cage
Image
All God's religions ... have not been able to put mankind back together again.
John Cage
Image
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
Image
A meal without mushrooms is like a day without rain.
John Cage
Image
...we make our lives by what we love.
John Cage
Image
As McLuhan says, everything happens at once.
John Cage
Image
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.
John Cage
Image
The world, the real is not an object. It is a process.
John Cage
Image
We need not destroy the past. It is gone.
John Cage