John Cage Quotes - Famous Quotes by John Cage
Born: 1912-09-05
Died: 1992-08-12
John Cage Biography
A finished work is exactly that, requires resurrection.
- John Cage
More quotations on: [ Music ] ***
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.
- John Cage
More quotations on: [ Music ] ***
I can't understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I'm frightened of old ones.
- John Cage
More quotations on: [ Ideas ] ***
I have nothing to say. I am saying it, and that is poetry.
- John Cage
More quotations on: [ Poetry ] ***
I imagine that as contemporary music goes on changing in the way that I'm changing it what will be done is to more and more completely liberate sounds from abstract ideas about them and more and more exactly to let them be physically uniquely themselves. This means for me: knowing more and more not what I think a sound is but what it actually is in all of its acoustical details and then letting this sound exist, itself, changing in a changing sonorous environment.
- John Cage
More quotations on: [ Music ] ***
If someone says 'can't,' that shows you what to do.
- John Cage
***
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.
- John Cage
More quotations on: [ Music ] ***
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.
- John Cage
More quotations on: [ Beauty ] ***
The highest purpose is to have no purpose at all. This puts one in accord with nature, in her manner of operation.
- John Cage
***
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.
- John Cage
More quotations on: [ Silence ] ***
There is poetry as soon as we realize that we possess nothing.
- John Cage
More quotations on: [ Poetry ] ***
We need not destroy the past. It is gone.
- John Cage
More quotations on: [ Past ] ***
Which is more musical, a truck passing by a factory or a truck passing by a music school?
- John Cage
More quotations on: [ Music ] ***
|
|
