Great Throughts Treasury

"Responsibility is to oneself; and the highest form of it is irresponsibility to oneself which is to say the calm acceptance of whatever responsibility to other and things comes a-long."

"When we separate music from life we get art."

"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."

"Let no one imagine that in owning a recording he has the music. The very practice of music is a celebration that we own nothing."

"The grand thing about the human mind is that it can turn its own tables and see meaninglessness as ultimate meaning."

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

"I can't understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I'm frightened of the old ones."

"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.”"

"Music is edifying, for from time to time, it sets the soul in operation."

"Structure without life is dead. But life without structure is un-seen."

"My favorite piece of music is the one we hear all the time if we are quiet."

"Ideas are one thing and what happens is another. "

"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."

"The highest purpose is to have no purpose at all. This puts one in accord with nature, in her manner of operation. "

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

"We carry our homes within us which enables us to fly. "

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

"As far as consistency of thought goes, I prefer inconsistency."

"We need not destroy the past. It is gone. "

"The emotions - love, mirth, the heroic, wonder, tranquility, fear, anger, sorrow, disgust - are in the audience."

"If you develop an ear for sounds that are musical it is like developing an ego. You begin to refuse sounds that are not musical and that way cut yourself off from a good deal of experience."

"Get yourself out of whatever cage you find yourself in."

"Every something is an echo of nothing."

"Art is sort of an experimental station in which one tries out living."

"Everything we do is music."

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

"Our business in living is to become fluent with the life we are living, and art can help this."

"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."

"I am trying to be unfamiliar with what I'm doing."

"Things we were going to do are now being done by others. They were, it seems, not in our minds to do (were we or they out of our minds?) but simply ready to enter any open mind, any mind disturbed enough not to have an idea in it."

"There is nothing we need to do that isn't dangerous."

"Wherever we are, what we hear is mostly noise. When we ignore it, it disturbs us. When we listen to it, we find it fascinating."

"Our intention is to affirm this life, not to bring order out of chaos, nor to suggest improvements in creation, but simply to wake up to the very life we're living, which is so excellent once one gets one's mind and desires out of its way and lets it act of it's own accord."

"A sound does not view itself as thought, as ought, as needing another sound for its elucidation, as etc.; it has not time for any consideration--it is occupied with the performance of its characteristics: before it has died away it must have made perfectly exact its frequency, its loudness, its length, its overtone structure, the precise morphology of these and of itself."

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

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