"I can't understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I'm frightened of the old ones."
Read quote
99 likes
Quote collection
John Cage quotes (page 1 of 8)
146 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"There is no such thing as an empty space or an empty time. There is always something to see, something to hear. In fact, try as we may to make a silence, we cannot."
Read quote
96 likes
"Everything you do is music, and everywhere is the best seat."
Read quote
73 likes
"A sound does not view itself as thought, as ought, as needing another sound for its elucidation, as etc.; it has not time for any consideration--it is occupied with the performance of its characteristics: before it has died away it must have made perfectly exact its frequency, its loudness, its length, its overtone structure, the precise morphology of these and of itself."
Read quote
59 likes
"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."
Read quote
54 likes
"The act of listening is in fact an act of composing."
Read quote
52 likes
"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."
Read quote
50 likes
"The world is no longer a romantic place; some of its people still are however, and therein lies the promise. Don't let the world win."
Read quote
47 likes
"It is not irritating to be where one is. It is only irritating to think one would like to be somewhere else."
Read quote
46 likes
"After I had been studying with him for two years, Schoenberg said, ‘In order to write music, you must have a feeling for harmony.’ I explained to him that I had no feeling for harmony. He then said that I would always encounter an obstacle, that it would be as though I came to a wall through which I could not pass. I said, ‘In that case I will devote my life to beating my head against that wall.’"
Read quote
42 likes
"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."
Read quote
42 likes
"I have nothing to say, and I am saying it."
Read quote
40 likes
"Good music can act as a guide to good living."
Read quote
39 likes
"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."
Read quote
38 likes
"My favorite piece [piece of music] is the one we hear all the time if we are quiet."
Read quote
37 likes
"The material of music is sound and silence. Integrating these is composing."
Read quote
35 likes
"We need not destroy the past. It is gone."
Read quote
32 likes
"Value judgments are destructive to our proper business, which is curiosity and awareness."
Read quote
30 likes
"There is poetry as soon as we realize that we possess nothing."
Read quote
28 likes
"If you develop an ear for sounds that are musical it is like developing an ego. You begin to refuse sounds that are not musical and that way cut yourself off from a good deal of experience."
Read quote
27 likes