John Cage quotes:

I can't understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I'm frightened of the old ones.

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

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.

I have nothing to say, I am saying it, and that is poetry.

Ideas are one thing and what happens is another.

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.

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.

It is better to make a piece of music than to perform one, better to perform one than to listen to one, better to listen to one than to misuse it as a means of distraction, entertainment, or acquisition of 'culture.'

Combine nursing homes with nursery schools. Bring very old and very young together: they interest one another.

It's useless to play lullabies for those who cannot sleep.

All God's religions ... have not been able to put mankind back together again.

An artist conscientiously moves in a direction which for some good reason he takes, putting one work in front of the other with the hope he'll arrive before death overtakes him.

We are involved in a life that passes understanding and our highest business is our daily life.

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.

My favorite music is the music I haven't yet heard

I was shocked at college to see one hundred of my classmates in the library all reading copies of the same book. Instead of doing as they did, I went into the stacks and read the first book written by an author whose name began with Z. I received the highest grade in the class. That convinced me that the institution was not being run correctly. I left.

I needed another basis for musical structure. This I found in sound's duration parameter, sound's only parameter which is present even when no sound is intended.

We need not destroy the past. It is gone.

I never had a hat, never wore one, but recently was given a brown suede duck-hunting hat. The moment I put it on I realized I was starved for a hat. I kept it warm by putting it on my head. I made plans to wear it especially when I was going to do any thinking. Somewhere in Virginia, I lost my hat.

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.

As far as consistency of thought goes, I prefer inconsistency.

It is not irritating to be where one is. It is only irritating to think one would like to be somewhere else.

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

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.

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.

There is poetry as soon as we realize that we possess nothing.

Our poetry now is the realization that we possess nothing. Anything therefore is a delight (since we do not posses it) and thus need not fear its loss.

Freedom from likes and dislikes, the sudden sense of identification, the spirit of comedy.

Sleep's what we need. It produces an emptiness in us into which sooner or later energies flow.

Art is sort of an experimental station in which one tries out living"

Music is a means of rapid transportation.

Power and profit structures're out of cahoots with current technology. Aware of new inventions, corporations put them aside, waiting for competitive reasons until they're obliged to use new gimmicks.

Value judgments are destructive to our proper business, which is curiosity and awareness.

I haven't been to a movie for three months of Sundays. I gather from what Carolyn reports that Hollywood now produces false entertainment: unmitigated violence on the screen; snickering, laughter in the audience.

Veblen called it the price-system. Mills called it the Power Elite. It's probably no more than ninety-nine people who don't know what they are doing. They're involved in high finance. Fascinating form of gambling.

Remove God from the world of ideas. Remove government, politics from society. Keep sex, humor, utilities. Let private property go.

Only chance to make the world a success for humanity lies in technology, grand possibility technology provides to do more with less, and indiscriminately for everyone. Return to nature as nature pre-technologically was, attractive and possible as it still in some places is, can only work for some of us.

In our forestspart divineand makes her heart palpitatewild and tame are one. What a delicious Sound!

Frost interviewing Noel Coward and Margaret Mead. Sir Noel's view of life is Sir Noel. Mead's mind is large and open, like Buckminster Fuller's. She found thoughts dull that suggest that men are superior to animals or plants.

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.

The emotions - love, mirth, the heroic, wonder, tranquility, fear, anger, sorrow, disgust - are in the audience.

The world is teeming; anything can happen.

Which is more musical, a truck passing by a factory or a truck passing by a music school?Are the people inside the school musical and the ones outside unmusical?What if the ones inside can't hear very well, would that change my question~?

nothing is accomplished by writing a piece of musicnothing is accomplished by hearing a piece of musicnothing is accomplished by playing a piece of musicour ears are now in excellent condition.

Computer mistake in grade-giving resulted in academic failure of several brilliant students. After some years the mistake was discovered. Letter was sent to each student inviting him to resume his studies. Each replied he was getting along very well without education.

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.

I certainly had no feeling for harmony, and Schoenberg thought that that would make it impossible for me to write music. He said, 'You'll come to a wall you won't be able to get through.' So I said, 'I'll beat my head against that wall.'

Which is more musical, a truck passing by a factory or a truck passing by a music school? Are the people inside the school musical and the ones outside unmusical? What if the ones inside can't hear very well, would that change my question?

Everything you do is music, and everywhere is the best seat.

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.

Where does beauty begin? Where does it end? Where it ends is where the artist begins.

Good music can act as a guide to good living.

My favorite piece of music is the one we hear all the time if we are quiet.

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.

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.

I have nothing to say, and I am saying it.

The material of music is sound and silence. Integrating these is composing.

Whether I make them or not, there are always sounds to be heard and all of them are excellent.

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.

The act of listening is in fact an act of composing.

Why make art ? To quiet the mind thus making it susceptible to divine influences.

To see, one must go beyond the imiagination and for that one must stand absolutely still as though at the center of a leap.

People who aren't artists often feel that artists are inspired. But if you work at your art you don't have time to be inspired.

When we separate music from life we get art.

Be happy whenever you can manage it. Enjoy yourself. It's lighter than you think.

We carry our homes within us which enables us to fly.

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.

Art's purpose is to sober and quiet the mind so that it is in accord with what happens.

Our business in living is to become fluent with the life we are living, and art can help this.

Art is whatever you can get away with.

All great art is a form of complaint

I am trying to check my habits of seeing, to counter them for the sake of greater freshness. I am trying to be unfamiliar with what I'm doing.

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

Get yourself out of whatever cage you find yourself in.

A 'mistake' is beside the point, for once anything happens it authentically is.

I believe the use of noise to make music will increase until we reach a music produced through the aid of electrical instruments which will make available for musical purposes any and all sounds that can be heard.

The Indians long ago knew that music was going on permanently and that hearing it was like looking out a window at a landscape which didn't stop when one turned away.

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.

In the nature of the use of chance operations is the belief that all answers answer all questions.

I like being moved. I don't like being pushed.

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.

In the dark, all cats are black.

Which is more musical: a truck passing by a factory or a truck passing by a music school?

There was a German philosopher who is very well known, his name was Immanuel Kant, and he said there are two things that don't have to mean anything, one is music and the other is laughter. Don't have to mean anything that is, in order to give us deep pleasure.

Every something is an echo of nothing

Music is edifying, for from time to time it sets the soul in operation.

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.

I want to change my way of seeing, NOT my way of feeling. I was perfectly happy about my feelings.

With just one musician, you can really do an unlimited number of things on the inside of the piano, if you have at your disposal an exploded keyboard.

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

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.

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.

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.

We are not committed to this or that. We are committed to the nothing in-between, whether we know it or not.

If my work is accepted, I must move on to the point where it is not.

Percussion music is revolution. Sound and rhythm have too long been submissive to the restrictions of nineteenth century music. Today we are fighting for their emancipation. Tomorrow, with electronic music in our ears, we will hear freedom. At the present stage of revolution, a healthy lawlessness is warranted. Experiment must necessarily be carried on by hitting anything-tin pans, rice bowls, iron pipes-anything we can lay our hands on. Not only hitting, but rubbing, scraping, making sound in every possible way...What we can't do ourselves will be done by machines which we will invent.

My favourite music is the music I haven't yet heard. I don't hear the music I write: I write in order to hear the music I haven't yet heard.

I remember loving sound before I ever took a music lesson. And so we make our lives by what we love.

Some people take music too seriously, and some don't take it seriously enough, others take it just right...

The world, the real is not an object. It is a process.

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.

If there are questions then, of course, there are answers, but the final answer makes the questions seem absurd.

Nothing more than nothing can be said.

We are living in a period in which many people have changed their mind about what the use of music is or could be for them. Something that doesn't speak or talk like a human being, that doesn't know its definition in the dictionary or its theory in the schools, that expresses itself simply by the fact of its vibrations. 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.

The responsibility of the artist consists in perfecting his work so that it may become attractively disinteresting.

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

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.

In an utter emptiness anything can take place.

Out of the work comes the work.

There will always be critics eager to fashion opinions for the lazy and incapable.

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.

Now that we have everything we need, we discover that there is almost nothing that we have that we want

The white paintings came first; my silent piece came later.

There are some good people in it, but the orchestra as a whole is equivalent to a gang bent on destruction.

Now that things are so simple, there's so much to do.

Why do you not do as I do? Letting go of your thoughts as though they were the cold ashes of a long dead fire?

Artists talk a lot about freedom. So, recalling the expression "free as a bird," Morton Feldman went to a park one day and spent some time watching our feathered friends. When he came back, he said, "You know? They're not free: they're fighting over bits of food.

Wherever we are, what we hear is mostly noise. When we ignore it, it disturbs us. When we listen to it, we find it fascinating.