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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.

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.
Make
Unconsciously
Consciously
Philosopher
Either
Acting
Music

More quotes by John Cage

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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
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The act of listening is in fact an act of composing.
John Cage
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Beware of losing what isn't in your head.
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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So somebody has talent? So what? Dime a dozen. And we're overpopulated. Actually we have more food than we have people and more art. We've gotten to the point of burning food. When will we begin to burn our art?
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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All God's religions ... have not been able to put mankind back together again.
John Cage
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Some people take music too seriously, and some don't take it seriously enough, others take it just right.
John Cage
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We only hear what we listen for.
John Cage
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...we make our lives by what we love.
John Cage
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There is poetry as soon as we realize that we possess nothing.
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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As McLuhan says, everything happens at once.
John Cage
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In the dark, all cats are black.
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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Our intention is to affirm this life, not to bring order out of chaos, nor to suggest improvements in creation, but simply to wake up to the very life we're living, which is so excellent once one gets one's mind and desires out of its way and lets it act of it's own accord.
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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There are some good people in it, but the orchestra as a whole is equivalent to a gang bent on destruction.
John Cage
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A meal without mushrooms is like a day without rain.
John Cage
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The responsibility of the artist consists in perfecting his work so that it may become attractively disinteresting.
John Cage