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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.
Sober
Quiet
Purpose
Art
Happens
Music
Mind
Accord
More quotes by 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
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
Don't try to create and analyze at the same time. They're different processes.
John Cage
To accept whatever comes, regardless of the consequences, is to be unafraid.
John Cage
If someone says can't, that shows you what to do.
John Cage
There will always be critics eager to fashion opinions for the lazy and incapable.
John Cage
The world is no longer a romantic place some of its people still are however, and therein lies the promise. Don't let the world win.
John Cage
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
Get yourself out of whatever cage you find yourself in.
John Cage
In an utter emptiness anything can take place.
John Cage
There are some good people in it, but the orchestra as a whole is equivalent to a gang bent on destruction.
John Cage
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
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
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
Try as we may to make a silence, we cannot.
John Cage
Each something is a celebration of the nothing that supports it.
John Cage
In that case I will devote my life to beating my head against that wall.
John Cage
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
Some people take music too seriously, and some don't take it seriously enough, others take it just right.
John Cage
