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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.
Art
Happens
Music
Mind
Accord
Sober
Quiet
Purpose

More quotes by John Cage

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To accept whatever comes, regardless of the consequences, is to be unafraid.
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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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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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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Composing for the prepared piano is not a criticism of the instrument. I'm only being practical.
John Cage
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Each moment presents what happens.
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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One shouldn't go to the woods looking for something, but rather to see what is there.
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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Which is more musical: a truck passing by a factory or a truck passing by a music school?
John Cage
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Art is whatever you can get away with.
John Cage
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Try as we may to make a silence, we cannot.
John Cage
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If my work is accepted, I must move on to the point where it is not.
John Cage
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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.
John Cage
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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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In an utter emptiness anything can take place.
John Cage
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A meal without mushrooms is like a day without rain.
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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Whether I make them or not, there are always sounds to be heard and all of them are excellent.
John Cage
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My work became an exploration of non-intention.
John Cage