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No one can have an idea once he starts really listening.

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.
Starts
Listening
Idea
Ideas
Really

More quotes by John Cage

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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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There will always be critics eager to fashion opinions for the lazy and incapable.
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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.
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Try as we may to make a silence, we cannot.
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All God's religions ... have not been able to put mankind back together again.
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Value judgments are destructive to our proper business, which is curiosity and awareness.
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If my work is accepted, I must move on to the point where it is not.
John Cage
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What right do I have to be in the woods, if the woods are not in me.
John Cage
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We need not destroy the past. It is gone.
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As McLuhan says, everything happens at once.
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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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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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Each something is a celebration of the nothing that supports it.
John Cage
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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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Until I die there will be sounds. And they will continue following my death. One need not fear about the future of music.
John Cage
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Get yourself out of whatever cage you find yourself in.
John Cage
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An error is simply a failure to adjust immediately from a preconception to an actuality.
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When we separate music from life we get is art.
John Cage
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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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In that case I will devote my life to beating my head against that wall.
John Cage