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The grand thing about the human mind is that it can turn its own tables and see meaninglessness as ultimate meaning.

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.
Humans
Thing
Grand
Mind
Tables
Ultimate
Meaning
Turn
Turns
Human

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As McLuhan says, everything happens at once.
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My favorite music is the music I haven't yet heard
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Look at everything. Don't close your eyes to the world around you. Look and become curious and interested in what there is to see.
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As far as consistency of thought goes, I prefer inconsistency.
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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.
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Get yourself out of whatever cage you find yourself in.
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Some people take music too seriously, and some don't take it seriously enough, others take it just right.
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Our business in living is to become fluent with the life we are living, and art can help this.
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There will always be critics eager to fashion opinions for the lazy and incapable.
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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.
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All God's religions ... have not been able to put mankind back together again.
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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.
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The responsibility of the artist consists in perfecting his work so that it may become attractively disinteresting.
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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.
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We need not destroy the past. It is gone.
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One shouldn't go to the woods looking for something, but rather to see what is there.
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A meal without mushrooms is like a day without rain.
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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.
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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.
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Value judgments are destructive to our proper business, which is curiosity and awareness.
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