Past Gone Quotes by John Cage

If something is boring after two minutes, try it for four. If still boring, then eight. Then sixteen. Then thirty-two. Eventually one discovers that…

— John Cage

It was at Harvard not quite forty years ago that I went into an anechoic [totally silent] chamber not expecting in that silent room…

— John Cage

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.…

— John Cage

“...the important questions are answered by not liking only but disliking and accepting equally what one likes and dislikes. Otherwise there is no access…

— John Cage

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

— John Cage

There is poetry as soon as we realize that we possess nothing.

— John Cage

To see, one must go beyond the imiagination and for that one must stand absolutely still as though at the center of a leap.

— John Cage

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

— John Cage

Our intention is to affirm this life, not to bring order out of chaos, nor to suggest improvements in creation, but simply to wake…

— John Cage

There are some good people in it, but the orchestra as a whole is equivalent to a gang bent on destruction.

— John Cage

Art's purpose is to sober and quiet the mind so that it is in accord with what happens.

— John Cage

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

“Farting, don't think, just fart.”

— John Cage

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

— John Cage

My work became an exploration of non-intention.

— John Cage