Quotes from John Cage

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

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

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.

Theatre takes place all the time - wherever one is - and art simply facilitates persuading one this is the case.

In that case I will devote my life to beating my head against that wall.

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

Don't try to create and analyze at the same time. They're different processes.

The truth is that everything causes everything else. We do not speak therefore of one thing causing another. There are no secrets. It's just we thought they said dead when they said bread.

...we make our lives by what we love.

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

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

Ideas are one thing, and what happens is another.

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

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

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.

Out of the work comes the work.

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

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

All great art is a form of complaint

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

When we separate music from life we get art.

If you don't have enough time to accomplish something, consider the work finished once it's begun.

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.

A finished work is exactly that, requires resurrection.