People paying attention to vibratory activity, not in reaction to a fixed ideal performance, but each time attentively to how it happens to be this time, not necessarily two times the same. A music that transports the listener to the moment where he is.

— John Cage

John Cage Quotes

The highest purpose is to have no purpose at all. This puts one in accord with nature, in her manner of operation.

— John Cage

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.

— John Cage

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.

— John Cage

Paper should be edible, nutritious. Inks used for printing or writing should have delicious flavors. Magazines or newspapers read at breakfast should be eaten for lunch. Instead of throwing one’s mail in the waste-basket, it should be saved for the dinner guests.

— John Cage

What right do I have to be in the woods, if the woods are not in me.

— John Cage

The grand thing about the human mind is that it can turn its own tables and see meaninglessness as ultimate meaning.

— John Cage

An error is simply a failure to adjust immediately from a preconception to an actuality.

— John Cage

We are simple-minded enough to think that if we were saying something we would use words. We are rather doing something. The meaning of what we do is determined by each one who sees and hears it.

— John Cage

One day when I was studying with Schoenberg, he pointed out the eraser on his pencil and said, ‘This end is more important than the other.’ After twenty years I learned to write directly in ink.

— John Cage

One shouldn’t go to the woods looking for something, but rather to see what is there.

— John Cage

Out of the work comes the work.

— John Cage

What is the purpose of writing music? One is, of course, not dealing with purposes but dealing with sounds. Or the answer must take the form of a paradox: a purposeful purposeless or a purposeless play. This play, however, is an affirmation of life – not an attempt to bring order out of chaos nor to suggest improvements in creation, but simply a way of waking up to the very life we’re living, which is so excellent once one gets one’s mind and one’s desires out of its way and lets it act of its own accord.

— John Cage

The usefulness of the useless is good news for artists, for art serves no useful purpose. It has to do with changing minds and spirits.

— John Cage

Begin anywhere.

— John Cage

My whole desire is to run up and down the sea coast looking for you.

— John Cage

Thoreau got up each morning and walked to the woods as though he had never been where he was going to, so that whatever was there came to him like liquid into an empty glass. Many people taking such a walk would have their heads so full of other ideas that it would be a long time before they were capable of hearing or seeing. Most people are blinded by themselves.

— John Cage

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.

— John Cage

I nearly left this earth a few minutes ago – ecstasy – word from you. Pretty soon I’ll write music for you.

— John Cage

I have attempted briefly here to set forth a view of the arts which does not separate them from the rest of life, but rather confuses the difference between Art and Life.

— John Cage

Composing’s one thing, performing’s another, listening’s a third. What can they have to do with one another?

— John Cage
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