Silence Quotes by John Cage (2024)

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“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.”
― John Cage, Silence: Lectures and Writings

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“Artists talk a lot about freedom. So, recalling the expression "free as a bird," Morton Feldman went to a park one day and spent some time watching our feathered friends. When he came back, he said, "You know? They're not free: they're fighting over bits of food.”
― John Cage, Silence: Lectures and Writings

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“The emotions - love, mirth, the heroic, wonder, tranquility, fear, anger, sorrow, disgust - are in the audience.”
― John Cage, Silence: Lectures and Writings

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“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, Silence: Lectures and Writings

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“The highest purpose is to have no purpose at all. This puts one in accordance with nature, in her manner of operation.”
― John Cage, Silence: Lectures and Writings

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“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, Silence: Lectures and Writings

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“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, Silence: Lectures and Writings

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“Nothing more then nothing can be said.
We make our lives by what we love.
Being American, having been trained to be sentimental, I fought for noises … when the war came along, I decided to use only quiet sounds. There seemed to me to be no truth, no good, in anything big.
Somebody asked Debussy how he wrote music. He said: “I take all the tones there are, leave out he one’s I don’t want, and use all the others”. Satie said: “When I was young, people told me; you’ll see when you’re fifty years old. Now I’m fifty. I’ve seen nothing”.
Slowly as the talk goes on, we are getting nowhere – and that is a pleasure.
It is not irritating to be where one is, it is only irritating to think one would like to be somewhere else.
If anybody is sleepy, let him go to sleep.
All I know about method is that when I’m not working I sometimes think I know something, but when I’m working, it is quit clear I know nothing.”
― John Cage, Silence: Lectures and Writings

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“nothing is accomplished by writing a piece of music
nothing is accomplished by hearing a piece of music
nothing is accomplished by playing a piece of music
our ears are now in excellent condition.”
― John Cage, Silence: Lectures and Writings

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“Whereas what we need is to fumble around in the darkness, because that's where our lives (not necessarily all of the time, but at least some of the time, and particularly when life gets problematical for us) takes place.”
― John Cage, Silence: Lectures and Writings

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“Now we have come to the end of the part about structure. However, it occurs to me to say more about structure.”
― John Cage, Silence: Lectures and Writings

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“Composing's one thing, performing's another, listening's a third. What can they have to do with one another?”
― John Cage, Silence: Lectures and Writings

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“...for we have found that by excluding we grow thin inside even though we may have an enormous bank account outside.”
― John Cage, Silence: Lectures and Writings

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“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, SILENCE

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“As I see it, poetry is not prose simply because poetry is in one way or another formalized. It is not poetry by reason of its content or ambiguity but by reason of its allowing musical elements (time, sound) to be introduced into the world of words. Thus, traditionally, information no matter how stuffy (e. g. the sutras and shastras of India) was transmitted in poetry. It was easier to grasp that way. Karl Shapiro may have been thinking along these lines when he wrote his Essay on Rime in poetry.”
― John Cage, Silence: Lectures and Writings

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