Quotes from John Cage

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

I believe that the use of noise to make music will continue and 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.

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

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.

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

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

We need not destroy the past. It is gone.

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

If this word "music" is sacred and reserved for eighteenth and nineteenth century instruments, we can substitute a more meaningful term: organization of sound.

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.

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.

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

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?

I want my writing to be as clear as water I can see through so that what I experienced is told without my being in any way in the way.

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

There is nothing we need to do that isn't dangerous.

Clothes I wear for mushroom hunting are rarely sent to the cleaner. They constitute a collection of odors I produce and gather while rambling in the woods. I notice not only dogs (cats, too) are delighted (they love to smell me).

In our forests part divine and makes her heart palpitate wild and tame are one. What a delicious Sound!

It would be better to have no school at all than the schools we now have. Encouraged, instead of frightened, children could learn several languages before reaching age of four, at that age engaging in the invention of their own languages. Play'd be play instead of being, as now, release of repressed anger.

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

You can feel an emotion, just don't think that it's so important.

Why is it that children, taught the names of the months and the fact that there are twelve of them, don't ask why the ninth is called the seventh (September), the tenth called the eight (October), the eleventh called the ninth (November), the twelfth called the tenth (December)?

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

Begin anywhere.