Quote

An error is simply a failure to adjust immediately from a preconception to an actuality.

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.
Errors
Failure
Events
Preconception
Simply
Preconceptions
Actuality
Adjust
Error
Immediately

More quotes by John Cage

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Each something is a celebration of the nothing that supports it.
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I don't need sound to talk to me.
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All God's religions ... have not been able to put mankind back together again.
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Out of the work comes the work.
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The purpose of music is to sober and quiet the mind, thus making it susceptible to divine influences.
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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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It is not irritating to be where one is. It is only irritating to think one would like to be somewhere else.
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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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We are involved in a life that passes understanding and our highest business is our daily life.
John Cage
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In the dark, all cats are black.
John Cage
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One day when I was studying with Schoenberg, he pointed out the eraser on his pencil and said, 'This end is more important than the other.' After twenty years I learned to write directly in ink.
John Cage
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...we make our lives by what we love.
John Cage
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Paper should be edible, nutritious. Inks used for printing or writing should have delicious flavors. Magazines or newspapers read at breakfast should be eaten for lunch. Instead of throwing one's mail in the waste-basket, it should be saved for the dinner guests.
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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All great art is a form of complaint
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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There is poetry as soon as we realize that we possess nothing.
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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Art is sort of an experimental station in which one tries out living.
John Cage