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Now that we have everything we need, we discover that there is almost nothing that we have that we want
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.
Almost
Money
Everything
Nothing
Need
Needs
Possession
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More quotes by 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
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
The purpose of music is to sober and quiet the mind, thus making it susceptible to divine influences.
John Cage
Whether I make them or not, there are always sounds to be heard and all of them are excellent.
John Cage
Which is more musical: a truck passing by a factory or a truck passing by a music school?
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
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
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
Be happy whenever you can manage it. Enjoy yourself. It's lighter than you think.
John Cage
One shouldn't go to the woods looking for something, but rather to see what is there.
John Cage
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
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
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
What right do I have to be in the woods, if the woods are not in me.
John Cage
If my work is accepted, I must move on to the point where it is not.
John Cage
We are involved in a life that passes understanding and our highest business is our daily life.
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
Each moment presents what happens.
John Cage
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
If something is boring after two minutes, try it for four. If still boring, then eight. Then sixteen. Then thirty-two. Eventually one discovers that it is not boring at all.
John Cage
