Top 120 John Cage Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “I can’t understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I’m frightened of the old ones.”

— John Cage

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

— John Cage

3. “I have nothing to say, and I am saying it.”

— John Cage

4. “Theatre takes place all the time – wherever one is – and art simply facilitates persuading one this is the case.”

— John Cage

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

— John Cage

6. “Get yourself out of whatever cage you find yourself in.”

— John Cage

7. “We only hear what we listen for.”

— John Cage

8. “Everyday is a beautiful day, Everything is pleasing.”

— John Cage

9. “There’s no such thing as silence. Something is always happening that makes a sound.”

— John Cage

10. “We carry our homes within us which enables us to fly.”

— John Cage

11. “In the dark, all cats are black.”

— John Cage

12. “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.’”

— John Cage

13. “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

14. “Until I die there will be sounds. And they will continue following my death. One need not fear about the future of music.”

— John Cage

15. “Don’t try to create and analyze at the same time. They’re different processes.”

— John Cage

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

— John Cage

17. “Begin anywhere.”

— John Cage

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

— John Cage

19. “I like being moved. I don’t like being pushed.”

— John Cage

20. “The white paintings came first; my silent piece came later.”

— John Cage

21. “Be happy whenever you can manage it. Enjoy yourself. It’s lighter than you think.”

— John Cage

22. “One need not fear for the future of music.”

— John Cage

23. “When we separate music from life we get art.”

— John Cage

24. “Music is a means of rapid transportation.”

— John Cage

25. “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.”

— John Cage

26. “You can feel an emotion; just don’t think that it’s so important.”

— John Cage

27. “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.”

— John Cage

28. “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.”

— John Cage

29. “Not one sound fears the silence that extinguishes it. And no silence exists that is not pregnant with sound.”

— John Cage

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

— John Cage

31. “The act of listening is in fact an act of composing.”

— John Cage

32. “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.”

— John Cage

33. “Every something is an echo of nothing.”

— John Cage

34. “College: two hundred people reading the same book. An obvious mistake. Two hundred people can read two hundred books.”

— John Cage

Featured in: Reading Quotes

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

— John Cage

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

— John Cage

37. “A ‘mistake’ is beside the point, for once anything happens it authentically is.”

— John Cage

38. “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

39. “The world is teeming; anything can happen.”

— John Cage

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

— John Cage

41. “There is poetry as soon as we realize that we possess nothing.”

— John Cage

42. “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.”

— John Cage

43. “In an utter emptiness anything can take place.”

— John Cage

44. “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.”

— John Cage

45. “To accept whatever comes, regardless of the consequences, is to be unafraid.”

— John Cage

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

— John Cage

47. “All great art is a form of complaint.”

— John Cage

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

— John Cage

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

— John Cage

50. “A meal without mushrooms is like a day without rain.”

— John Cage