John Cage Quotes

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.

You can feel an emotion; just don't think that it's so important.

Music is a means of rapid transportation.

There is poetry as soon as we realize that we possess nothing.

If there are questions then, of course, there are answers, but the final answer makes the questions seem absurd.

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.

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.

Our business in living is to become fluent with the life we are living, and art can help this.

As McLuhan says, everything happens at once.

Wherever we are, what we hear is mostly noise. When we ignore it, it disturbs us. When we listen to it, we find it fascinating.

A mind that is interested in changing...is interested precisely in the things that are at extremes. I'm certainly like that. Unless we go to extremes, we won't get anywhere.

My work became an exploration of non-intention.

Try as we may to make a silence, we cannot.

Music is edifying, for from time to time it sets the soul in operation.

Ideas are one thing and what happens is another.

A 'mistake' is beside the point, for once anything happens it authentically is.

The function of Art is to imitate Nature in her manner of operation. Our understanding of her manner of operation&Rdquo; changes according to advances in the sciences.

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.

The act of listening is in fact an act of composing.

To see, one must go beyond the imiagination and for that one must stand absolutely still as though at the center of a leap.

People who aren't artists often feel that artists are inspired. But if you work at your art you don't have time to be inspired.

Art is whatever you can get away with.

...we make our lives by what we love.

Percussion music is revolution. Sound and rhythm have too long been submissive to the restrictions of nineteenth century music. Today we are fighting for their emancipation. Tomorrow, with electronic music in our ears, we will hear freedom. At the present stage of revolution, a healthy lawlessness is warranted. Experiment must necessarily be carried on by hitting anything-tin pans, rice bowls, iron pipes-anything we can lay our hands on. Not only hitting, but rubbing, scraping, making sound in every possible way...What we can't do ourselves will be done by machines which we will invent.

Guy Nearing told us it's a good idea when hunting mushrooms to have a pleasant goal, a waterfall for instance, and, having reached it, to return another way. When, however, we're obliged to go and come back by the same path, returning we notice mushrooms we hadn't noticed going out.

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.

When we separate music from life we get is art.

Value judgments are destructive to our proper business, which is curiosity and awareness.

We need not destroy the past. It is gone.

When I hear what we call music, it seems to me that someone is talking. And talking about his feelings, or about his ideas of relationships. But when I hear traffic, the sound of traffic - here on Sixth Avenue, for instance - I don’t have the feeling that anyone is talking. I have the feeling that sound is acting. And I love the activity of sound... I don’t need sound to talk to me.

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

Everything I see is something I haven't memorized.

Which is more musical, a truck passing by a factory or a truck passing by a music school? Are the people inside the school musical and the ones outside unmusical? What if the ones inside can't hear very well, would that change my question?

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.

I have nothing to say, and I am saying it.

All I know about method is that when I am not working I sometimes think I know something, but when I am working, it is quite clear I know nothing.

Every something is an echo of nothing

An artist conscientiously moves in a direction which for some good reason he takes, putting one work in front of the other with the hope he'll arrive before death overtakes him.

Art is sort of an experimental station in which one tries out living.

Everyday is a beautiful day, Everything is pleasing

A meal without mushrooms is like a day without rain.

Nothing more than nothing can be said.

There's no such thing as silence. Something is always happening that makes a sound.

It was at Harvard not quite forty years ago that I went into an anechoic [totally silent] chamber not expecting in that silent room to hear two sounds: one high, my nervous system in operation, one low, my blood in circulation. The reason I did not expect to hear those two sounds was that they were set into vibration without any intention on my part. That experience gave my life direction, the exploration of nonintention. No one else was doing that. I would do it for us. I did not know immediately what I was doing, nor, after all these years, have I found out much. I compose music.

Everything you do is music, and everywhere is the best seat.

I like being moved. I don't like being pushed.

Now that things are so simple, there's so much to do.

Each moment presents what happens.