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It is not futile to do what we do. We wake up with energy and we do something. And we make, of course, failures and we make mistakes, but we sometimes get glimpses of what we might do next.

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.
Energy
Futile
Next
Glimpse
Might
Failures
Sometimes
Wake
Something
Mistakes
Make
Mistake
Courses
Course
Glimpses

More quotes by John Cage

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Which is more musical: a truck passing by a factory or a truck passing by a music school?
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My work became an exploration of non-intention.
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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.
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Try as we may to make a silence, we cannot.
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Beware of losing what isn't in your head.
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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.
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If someone says can't, that shows you what to do.
John Cage
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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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There will always be critics eager to fashion opinions for the lazy and incapable.
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Our poetry now is the realization that we possess nothing. Anything therefore is a delight (since we do not posses it) and thus need not fear its loss.
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If this word music is sacred and reserved for eighteenth and nineteenth century instruments, we can substitute a more meaningful term: organization of sound.
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In an utter emptiness anything can take place.
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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.
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It's useless to play lullabies for those who cannot sleep.
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Out of the work comes the work.
John Cage
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In the nature of the use of chance operations is the belief that all answers answer all questions.
John Cage
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When we separate music from life we get is art.
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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.
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The world is teeming anything can happen.
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My favorite music is the music I haven't yet heard
John Cage