John Cage Quotes

The majority of the world is empty space. Empty space, empty space, empty space. All that we see in the world, the life, the animals, plants, people - it's all empty space. That's amazing!

If the room falls silent for a moment, all I hear is white noise.

I often have the feeling that acting is really not difficult, because all I do is I just listen. I just listen. I just listen to what there is. And if there's nothing, then I listen to nothing. If there's a chair, and it's empty, I listen to an empty chair, and I will respond to it.

For the listener, who listens in the snow, / And, nothing himself, beholds / Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

Space has no "existence." "To exist" literally means "to stand out." You cannot understand space because it doesn't stand out. Although in itself it has no existence, it enables everything else to exist. Silence has no existence either, nor does the unmanifested.

Often to understand, we have to look into emptiness.

Good and bad, happy and sad, all thoughts vanish into emptiness like the imprint of a bird in the sky.

When I look at things, I always see the space they occupy. I always want the space to reappear, to make a comeback, because it's lost space when there's something in it.

The mass gross absence of sound in space is more than just silence.

See without looking, hear without listening, breathe without asking.

The most deadly picture is a picture of nothing at all. The colors are there, but there is no image, nothing.

Silence, I discover, is something you can actually hear.

There are many types of silence. There is a silence before the note, there is a silence at the end and there is a silence in the middle.

I'm trying to do what I have never done - give the impression one has on entering a room: one sees everything and at the same time nothing.

A sponge sees everything? A sponge sees nothing.

In the beginning, there was silence. And out of the silence came the sound. The sound is not here.

Nature abhors a vacuum.

Only silence perfects silence.

Everything that's created comes out of silence. Your thoughts emerge from the nothingness of silence. Your words come out of this void. Your very essence emerged from emptiness. All creativity requires some stillness.

We cannot let another person into our hearts or minds unless we empty ourselves. We can truly listen to him or truly hear her only out of emptiness.

If we had a keen vision of all that is ordinary in human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow or the squirrel's heart beat, and we should die of that roar which is the other side of silence.

It was a place without a single feature of the space-time matrix that he knew. It was a place where nothing yet had happened - an utter emptiness. There was neither light nor dark: there was nothing here but emptiness.

I'm saying look, here they come, pay attention. Let your eyes transform what appears ordinary, commonplace, into what it is, a moment in time, an observed fragment of eternity.

Without consciousness, space and time are nothing.

Every word is like an unnecessary stain on silence and nothingness.