Top 120 John Cage Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “Which is more musical, a truck passing by a factory or a truck passing by a music school? Are the people inside the school musical and the ones outside unmusical? What if the ones inside can’t hear very well, would that change my question?”

— John Cage

102. “So somebody has talent? So what? Dime a dozen. And we’re overpopulated. Actually we have more food than we have people and more art. We’ve gotten to the point of burning food. When will we begin to burn our art?”

— John Cage

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

— John Cage

104. “Paper should be edible, nutritious. Inks used for printing or writing should have delicious flavors. Magazines or newspapers read at breakfast should be eaten for lunch. Instead of throwing one’s mail in the waste-basket, it should be saved for the dinner guests.”

— John Cage

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

— John Cage

106. “Guy Nearing told us it’s a good idea when hunting mushrooms to have a pleasant goal, a waterfall for instance, and, having reached it, to return another way. When, however, we’re obliged to go and come back by the same path, returning we notice mushrooms we hadn’t noticed going out.”

— John Cage

107. “Now that things are so simple, there’s so much to do.”

— John Cage

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

— John Cage

109. “Each moment presents what happens.”

— John Cage

110. “My work became an exploration of non-intention.”

— John Cage

111. “Beware of losing what isn’t in your head.”

— John Cage

112. “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.”

— John Cage

113. “I nearly left this earth a few minutes ago – ecstasy – word from you. Pretty soon I’ll write music for you.”

— John Cage

114. “I discovered that those who seldom dwell on their emotions know better than anyone else just what an emotion is.”

— John Cage

115. “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

116. “If there are questions then, of course, there are answers, but the final answer makes the questions seem absurd.”

— John Cage

117. “Ideas are one thing and what happens is another.”

— John Cage

118. “Food, one assumes, provides nourishment; but Americans eat it fully aware that small amounts of poison have been added to improve its appearance and delay its putrefaction.”

— John Cage

119. “I have attempted briefly here to set forth a view of the arts which does not separate them from the rest of life, but rather confuses the difference between Art and Life.”

— John Cage

120. “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

121. “There is nothing we need to do that isn’t dangerous.”

— John Cage

122. “Now that we have everything we need, we discover that there is almost nothing that we have that we want.”

— John Cage

123. “Power and profit structures’re out of cahoots with current technology. Aware of new inventions, corporations put them aside, waiting for competitive reasons until they’re obliged to use new gimmicks.”

— John Cage

124. “I needed another basis for musical structure. This I found in sound’s duration parameter, sound’s only parameter which is present even when no sound is intended.”

— John Cage

125. “Now we have come to the end of the part about structure. However, it occurs to me to say more about structure.”

— John Cage

126. “What is the purpose of writing music? One is, of course, not dealing with purposes but dealing with sounds. Or the answer must take the form of a paradox: a purposeful purposeless or a purposeless play. This play, however, is an affirmation of life – not an attempt to bring order out of chaos nor to suggest improvements in creation, but simply a way of waking up to the very life we’re living, which is so excellent once one gets one’s mind and one’s desires out of its way and lets it act of its own accord.”

— John Cage

127. “When I went to the analyst for a kind of preliminary meeting, he said, ‘I’ll be able to fix you so that you’ll write much more music than you do now.’ I said, ‘Good heavens! I already write too much, it seems to me.’ That promise of his put me off.”

— John Cage

128. “Everything I see is something I haven’t memorized.”

— John Cage

129. “Composing’s one thing, performing’s another, listening’s a third. What can they have to do with one another?”

— John Cage