Quote

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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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.
Assuming
Nourishment
Small
Appearance
Amounts
Culture
Cooking
Delay
Fully
Culinary
Aware
Added
Provides
Americans
Poison
Putrefaction
Amount
Improve
Assumes
Food

More quotes by John Cage

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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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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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Composing for the prepared piano is not a criticism of the instrument. I'm only being practical.
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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The purpose of music is to sober and quiet the mind, thus making it susceptible to divine influences.
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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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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As far as consistency of thought goes, I prefer inconsistency.
John Cage
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As McLuhan says, everything happens at once.
John Cage
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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.
John Cage
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I don't need sound to talk to me.
John Cage
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Be happy whenever you can manage it. Enjoy yourself. It's lighter than you think.
John Cage
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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
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All great art is a form of complaint
John Cage
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We're breaking all of the rules, even our own rules, and how do we do that? By leaving plenty of room for X quantities.
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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The function of Art is to imitate Nature in her manner of operation. Our understanding of her manner of operation&Rdquo changes according to advances in the sciences.
John Cage
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Out of the work comes the work.
John Cage
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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.
John Cage
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It is not irritating to be where one is. It is only irritating to think one would like to be somewhere else.
John Cage