Quote

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.

John Cage

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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.
Artist
Food
Park
Back
Went
Parks
Time
Came
Spent
Talk
Artists
Friends
Watching
Fighting
Bird
Morton
Freedom
Expression
Feathered
Free
Bits
Recalling

More quotes by John Cage

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We are involved in a life that passes understanding and our highest business is our daily life.
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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.
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The purpose of music is to sober and quiet the mind, thus making it susceptible to divine influences.
John Cage
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What right do I have to be in the woods, if the woods are not in me.
John Cage
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The Indians long ago knew that music was going on permanently and that hearing it was like looking out a window at a landscape which didn't stop when one turned away.
John Cage
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Get yourself out of whatever cage you find yourself in.
John Cage
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To accept whatever comes, regardless of the consequences, is to be unafraid.
John Cage
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A meal without mushrooms is like a day without rain.
John Cage
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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
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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.
John Cage
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Guy Nearing told us it's a good idea when hunting mushrooms to have a pleasant goal, a waterfall for instance, and, having reached it, to return another way. When, however, we're obliged to go and come back by the same path, returning we notice mushrooms we hadn't noticed going out.
John Cage
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My favorite music is the music I haven't yet heard
John Cage
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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.
John Cage
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In an utter emptiness anything can take place.
John Cage
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Our business in living is to become fluent with the life we are living, and art can help this.
John Cage
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Art is sort of an experimental station in which one tries out living.
John Cage
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The grand thing about the human mind is that it can turn its own tables and see meaninglessness as ultimate meaning.
John Cage
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There's no such thing as silence. Something is always happening that makes a sound.
John Cage
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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
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When you start working, everybody is in your studio- the past, your friends, enemies, the art world, and above all, your own ideas- all are there. But as you continue painting, they start leaving, one by one, and you are left completely alone. Then, if you are lucky, even you leave.
John Cage