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Art's purpose is to sober and quiet the mind so that it is in accord with what happens.

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.
Purpose
Art
Happens
Music
Mind
Accord
Sober
Quiet

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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Art is whatever you can get away with.
John Cage
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There will always be critics eager to fashion opinions for the lazy and incapable.
John Cage
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Each something is a celebration of the nothing that supports it.
John Cage
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Music is a means of rapid transportation.
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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All God's religions ... have not been able to put mankind back together again.
John Cage
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What right do I have to be in the woods, if the woods are not in me.
John Cage
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My work became an exploration of non-intention.
John Cage
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The material of music is sound and silence. Integrating these is composing.
John Cage
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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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Until I die there will be sounds. And they will continue following my death. One need not fear about the future of music.
John Cage
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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
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In an utter emptiness anything can take place.
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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An error is simply a failure to adjust immediately from a preconception to an actuality.
John Cage
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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
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Each moment presents what happens.
John Cage
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Value judgments are destructive to our proper business, which is curiosity and awareness.
John Cage
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In the nature of the use of chance operations is the belief that all answers answer all questions.
John Cage