Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
It is not irritating to be where one is. It is only irritating to think one would like to be somewhere else.
John Cage
Share
Change background
T
T
T
Change font
Original
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.
Somewhere
Else
Would
Think
Thinking
Like
Irritating
More quotes by John Cage
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
...we make our lives by what we love.
John Cage
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
A meal without mushrooms is like a day without rain.
John Cage
If my work is accepted, I must move on to the point where it is not.
John Cage
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
My work became an exploration of non-intention.
John Cage
The material of music is sound and silence. Integrating these is composing.
John Cage
There was a German philosopher who is very well known, his name was Immanuel Kant, and he said there are two things that don’t have to mean anything, one is music and the other is laughter. Don’t have to mean anything that is, in order to give us deep pleasure.
John Cage
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.
John Cage
Our business in living is to become fluent with the life we are living, and art can help this.
John Cage
It's useless to play lullabies for those who cannot sleep.
John Cage
I don't need sound to talk to me.
John Cage
Don't try to create and analyze at the same time. They're different processes.
John Cage
When we separate music from life we get is art.
John Cage
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
Our intention is to affirm this life, not to bring order out of chaos, nor to suggest improvements in creation, but simply to wake up to the very life we're living, which is so excellent once one gets one's mind and desires out of its way and lets it act of it's own accord.
John Cage
My favourite music is the music I haven't yet heard. I don't hear the music I write: I write in order to hear the music I haven't yet heard.
John Cage
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.
John Cage
We need not destroy the past. It is gone.
John Cage
