"If this word "music" is sacred and reserved for eighteenth and nineteenth century instruments, we can substitute a more meaningful term: organization of sound."
Read quote
7 likes
Quote collection
John Cage quotes (page 4 of 8)
146 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"Our business in living is to become fluent with the life we are living, and art can help this."
Read quote
7 likes
"When we separate music from life we get is art."
Read quote
7 likes
"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."
Read quote
7 likes
"The attitude I take is that everyday life is more interesting than forms of celebration, when we become aware of it. That when is when our intentions go down to zero. Then suddenly you notice that the world is magical."
Read quote
7 likes
"The grand thing about the human mind is that it can turn its own tables and see meaninglessness as ultimate meaning."
Read quote
7 likes
"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."
Read quote
7 likes
"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."
Read quote
7 likes
"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."
Read quote
7 likes
"I like being moved. I don't like being pushed."
Read quote
7 likes
"The purpose of music is to sober and quiet the mind, thus making it susceptible to divine influences."
Read quote
6 likes
"Now that we have everything we need, we discover that there is almost nothing that we have that we want"
Read quote
6 likes
"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."
Read quote
6 likes
"An error is simply a failure to adjust immediately from a preconception to an actuality."
Read quote
6 likes
"Out of the work comes the work."
Read quote
6 likes
"The emotions - love, mirth, the heroic, wonder, tranquility, fear, anger, sorrow, disgust - are in the audience."
Read quote
6 likes
"Discord occasions a momentary distress to the ear, which remains unsatisfied, and even uneasy, until it hears something better. I am convinced...that provided the ear be at length made amends, there are few dissonances too strong for it. Disharmony, to paraphrase Bergson's statement about disorder, is simply a harmony to which many are unaccustomed."
Read quote
6 likes
"In the dark, all cats are black."
Read quote
6 likes
"It's useless to play lullabies for those who cannot sleep."
Read quote
6 likes
"The responsibility of the artist consists in perfecting his work so that it may become attractively disinteresting."
Read quote
6 likes