The only reason we wore sunglasses onstage was because we couldn’t stand the sight of the audience.
—John Cage
Topics: Audiences
We carry our homes within us which enables us to fly.
—John Cage
Topics: Independence
We need not destroy the past. It is gone.
—John Cage
Topics: Past, Past and Present
I can’t understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I’m frightened of the old ones.
—John Cage
Ideas are one thing, and what happens is another.
—John Cage
Topics: Inaction, Procrastination, Getting Going
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.”
—John Cage
Topics: Music
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.
—John Cage
Topics: Art
I like what the future holds. I don’t like thinking about the past.
—John Cage
Topics: Thinking
To accept whatever comes, regardless of the consequences, is to be unafraid.
—John Cage
Topics: Courage, Difficulty
Where does beauty begin and where does it end? It ends where the artist begins.
—John Cage
Topics: Beauty
An error is simply a failure to adjust immediately from a preconception to an actuality.
—John Cage
Topics: Failures, Mistakes
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
Topics: Romance
If someone says can’t, that shows you what to do.
—John Cage
Topics: Determination, One liners, Challenges
We are involved in a life that passes understanding: our highest business is our daily life.
—John Cage
Topics: Time Management, Value of a Day
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.
—John Cage
Topics: Music
It is not irritating to be where one is. It is only irritating to think one would like to be somewhere else.
—John Cage
Topics: Opportunities, Reality
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
- Frank Zappa American Rock Guitarist, Singer, Composer
- Gian Carlo Menotti Italian-born American Composer
- Claude Debussy French Composer
- Igor Stravinsky Russian-born American Composer
- Stephen Sondheim American Musician
- Aaron Copland American Composer
- Ned Rorem American Composer
- Lukas Foss German-American Composer
- Jean Sibelius Finnish Composer
- Robert Anton Wilson American Polymath
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