Top 120 John Cage Quotes (2026 Update)
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51. “If you don’t have enough time to accomplish something, consider the work finished once it’s begun.”

— John Cage

52. “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

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

— John Cage

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

— John Cage

55. “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.”

— John Cage

56. “It’s useless to play lullabies for those who cannot sleep.”

— John Cage

57. “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.”

— John Cage

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

— John Cage

59. “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.”

— John Cage

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

— John Cage

61. “I am trying to be unfamiliar with what I’m doing.”

— John Cage

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

— John Cage

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

— John Cage

64. “The emotions – love, mirth, the heroic, wonder, tranquility, fear, anger, sorrow, disgust – are in the audience.”

— John Cage

65. “The usefulness of the useless is good news for artists, for art serves no useful purpose. It has to do with changing minds and spirits.”

— John Cage

66. “Composing for the prepared piano is not a criticism of the instrument. I’m only being practical.”

— John Cage

67. “All I know about method is that when I am not working I sometimes think I know something, but when I am working, it is quite clear I know nothing.”

— John Cage

68. “Some people take music too seriously, and some don’t take it seriously enough, others take it just right...”

— John Cage

69. “Nothing more than nothing can be said.”

— John Cage

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

— John Cage

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

— John Cage

72. “My favorite music is the music I haven’t yet heard.”

— John Cage

73. “One shouldn’t go to the woods looking for something, but rather to see what is there.”

— John Cage

74. “After I had been studying with him for two years, Schoenberg said, “In order to write music, you must have a feeling for harmony.” I explained to him that I had no feeling for harmony. He then said that I would always encounter an obstacle, that it would be as though I came to a wall through which I could not pass. I said, ‘In that case I will devote my life to beating my head against that wall.”

— John Cage

75. “Which is more musical: a truck passing by a factory or a truck passing by a music school?”

— John Cage

76. “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.”

— John Cage

77. “If someone says can’t, that shows you what to do.”

— John Cage

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

— John Cage

79. “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.”

— John Cage

80. “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.”

— John Cage

81. “No one can have an idea once he starts really listening.”

— John Cage

82. “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.”

— John Cage

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

— John Cage

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

— John Cage

85. “Art is sort of an experimental station in which one tries out living.”

— John Cage

86. “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.”

— John Cage

87. “Art’s purpose is to sober and quiet the mind so that it is in accord with what happens.”

— John Cage

88. “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

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

— John Cage

90. “What I’m proposing, to myself and other people, is what I often call the tourist attitude – that you act as though you’ve never been there before. So that you’re not supposed to know anything about it. If you really get down to brass tacks, we have never been anywhere before.”

— John Cage

91. “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.”

— John Cage

92. “As McLuhan says, everything happens at once.”

— John Cage

93. “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?”

— John Cage

94. “Thoreau got up each morning and walked to the woods as though he had never been where he was going to, so that whatever was there came to him like liquid into an empty glass. Many people taking such a walk would have their heads so full of other ideas that it would be a long time before they were capable of hearing or seeing. Most people are blinded by themselves.”

— John Cage

95. “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.”

— John Cage

96. “Good music can act as a guide to good living.”

— John Cage

97. “A finished work is exactly that, requires resurrection.”

— John Cage

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

— John Cage

99. “My whole desire is to run up and down the sea coast looking for you.”

— John Cage

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

— John Cage