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If someone says can't, that shows you what to do.
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.
Someone
Impossibility
Possibility
Says
Challenges
Shows
More quotes by 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
Composing for the prepared piano is not a criticism of the instrument. I'm only being practical.
John Cage
A meal without mushrooms is like a day without rain.
John Cage
Each moment presents what happens.
John Cage
The material of music is sound and silence. Integrating these is composing.
John Cage
Art's purpose is to sober and quiet the mind so that it is in accord with what happens.
John Cage
Look at everything. Don't close your eyes to the world around you. Look and become curious and interested in what there is to see.
John Cage
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
...we make our lives by what we love.
John Cage
The grand thing about the human mind is that it can turn its own tables and see meaninglessness as ultimate meaning.
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
So somebody has talent? So what? Dime a dozen. And we're overpopulated. Actually we have more food than we have people and more art. We've gotten to the point of burning food. When will we begin to burn our art?
John Cage
An error is simply a failure to adjust immediately from a preconception to an actuality.
John Cage
The world, the real is not an object. It is a process.
John Cage
The world is no longer a romantic place some of its people still are however, and therein lies the promise. Don't let the world win.
John Cage
In the dark, all cats are black.
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
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
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
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
