John Cage

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.

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

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

We are involved in a life that passes understanding: our highest business is our daily life.

Discord occasions a momentary distress to the ear which remains unsatisfied and even uneasy until it hears something better. I am convinced...that provided the ear be at length made amends there are few dissonances too strong for it. Disharmony to paraphrase Bergson's statement about disorder is simply a harmony to which many are unaccustomed.

Ideas are one thing and what happens is another.

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

To accept whatever comes regardless of the consequences is to be unafraid.

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

Put 'em who threaten possessions and power together with 'em who offend our tastes in sex and dope. Those who're touched, put 'em in asylums. Pack off old ones to 'senior communities,' nursing homes. Our children? Keep'em prisoner, baby-sitter as warden. School? Good for fifteen to twenty years. Army afterward. Liberated, we live in prison. No this, no that. Kill us before we die!

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

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

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

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?

Veblen called it the price-system. Mills called it the Power Elite. It's probably no more than ninety-nine people who don't know what they are doing. They're involved in high finance. Fascinating form of gambling.

Computer mistake in grade-giving resulted in academic failure of several brilliant students. After some years the mistake was discovered. Letter was sent to each student inviting him to resume his studies. Each replied he was getting along very well without education.

Sleep's what we need. It produces an emptiness in us into which sooner or later energies flow.

We, the garden of technology. We, undecidable.