John Cage Quotes
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Try as we may to make a silence, we cannot.
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We only hear what we listen for.
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We need not destroy the past. It is gone.
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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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I like being moved. I don't like being pushed.
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Some people take music too seriously, and some don't take it seriously enough, others take it just right.
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If you don't have enough time to accomplish something, consider the work finished once it's begun.
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I don't need sound to talk to me.
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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.
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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.
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...we make our lives by what we love.
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The highest purpose is to have no purpose at all. This puts one in accord with nature, in her manner of operation.
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To accept whatever comes, regardless of the consequences, is to be unafraid.
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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.
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Nothing more than nothing can be said.
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As far as consistency of thought goes, I prefer inconsistency.
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The material of music is sound and silence. Integrating these is composing.
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The emotions - love, mirth, the heroic, wonder, tranquility, fear, anger, sorrow, disgust - are in the audience.
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The truth is that everything causes everything else. We do not speak therefore of one thing causing another. There are no secrets. It's just we thought they said dead when they said bread.
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The world, the real is not an object. It is a process.
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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.
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Music is a means of rapid transportation.
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In an utter emptiness anything can take place.
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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.
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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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To see, one must go beyond the imiagination and for that one must stand absolutely still as though at the center of a leap.
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I remember loving sound before I ever took a music lesson. And so we make our lives by what we love.
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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.
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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.
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You can feel an emotion; just don't think that it's so important.
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