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The material of music is sound and silence. Integrating these is composing.

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.
Music
Integrating
Composing
Material
Materials
Silence
Sound

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The act of listening is in fact an act of composing.
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Art is sort of an experimental station in which one tries out living.
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For myself and my own experience now, I don't really need any music. I have enough to listen to with just the sounds of the environment. I listen to the sounds of 6th avenue.
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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.
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...we make our lives by what we love.
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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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The Indians long ago knew that music was going on permanently and that hearing it was like looking out a window at a landscape which didn't stop when one turned away.
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We need not destroy the past. It is gone.
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Which is more musical: a truck passing by a factory or a truck passing by a music school?
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In the nature of the use of chance operations is the belief that all answers answer all questions.
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It's useless to play lullabies for those who cannot sleep.
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An error is simply a failure to adjust immediately from a preconception to an actuality.
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To accept whatever comes, regardless of the consequences, is to be unafraid.
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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.
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There is poetry as soon as we realize that we possess nothing.
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The first question I ask myself when something doesn't seem to be beautiful is why do I think it's not beautiful. And very shortly you discover that there is no reason.
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Whether I make them or not, there are always sounds to be heard and all of them are excellent.
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Value judgments are destructive to our proper business, which is curiosity and awareness.
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As far as consistency of thought goes, I prefer inconsistency.
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There will always be critics eager to fashion opinions for the lazy and incapable.
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