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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.

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.
Really
Tourists
Never
Anywhere
People
Supposed
Attitude
Call
Tacks
Though
Proposing
Often
Tourist
Anything
Brass

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We only hear what we listen for.
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Our business in living is to become fluent with the life we are living, and art can help this.
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Now that we have everything we need, we discover that there is almost nothing that we have that we want
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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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Until I die there will be sounds. And they will continue following my death. One need not fear about the future of music.
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If someone says can't, that shows you what to do.
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We need not destroy the past. It is gone.
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There are some good people in it, but the orchestra as a whole is equivalent to a gang bent on destruction.
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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.
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As McLuhan says, everything happens at once.
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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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Everyday is a beautiful day, Everything is pleasing
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In that case I will devote my life to beating my head against that wall.
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It's useless to play lullabies for those who cannot sleep.
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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.
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As far as consistency of thought goes, I prefer inconsistency.
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Art is sort of an experimental station in which one tries out living.
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I don't need sound to talk to me.
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We are involved in a life that passes understanding and our highest business is our daily life.
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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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