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Beware of losing what isn't in your head.
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.
Beware
Losing
Head
More quotes by John Cage
Don't try to create and analyze at the same time. They're different processes.
John Cage
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.
John Cage
The purpose of music is to sober and quiet the mind, thus making it susceptible to divine influences.
John Cage
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
The responsibility of the artist consists in perfecting his work so that it may become attractively disinteresting.
John Cage
We are involved in a life that passes understanding and our highest business is our daily life.
John Cage
If something is boring after two minutes, try it for four. If still boring, then eight. Then sixteen. Then thirty-two. Eventually one discovers that it is not boring at all.
John Cage
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
Each something is a celebration of the nothing that supports it.
John Cage
There will always be critics eager to fashion opinions for the lazy and incapable.
John Cage
Some people take music too seriously, and some don't take it seriously enough, others take it just right.
John Cage
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
People paying attention to vibratory activity, not in reaction to a fixed ideal performance, but each time attentively to how it happens to be this time, not necessarily two times the same. A music that transports the listener to the moment where he is.
John Cage
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
The material of music is sound and silence. Integrating these is composing.
John Cage
Get yourself out of whatever cage you find yourself in.
John Cage
One shouldn't go to the woods looking for something, but rather to see what is there.
John Cage
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.
John Cage
It is not futile to do what we do. We wake up with energy and we do something. And we make, of course, failures and we make mistakes, but we sometimes get glimpses of what we might do next.
John Cage
In an utter emptiness anything can take place.
John Cage
