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I have nothing to say/ and I am saying it/ and that is poetry/ as I need it.

— John Cage Lecture on Nothing (1949)

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Poetry

More quotes by John Cage

A finished work is exactly that, requires resurrection.

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?

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

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

Richard Kostelanetz (1988)

Our poetry now is the realization that we possess nothing. Anything therefore is a delight (since we do not possess it) and thus need not fear its loss.

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There is a property in the horizon which no man has but he whose eye can integrate all the parts, that is, the poet.

Ralph Waldo Emerson Nature (1836)

Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality.

T. S. Eliot Tradition and the Individual Talent (1919)

Poetry, unlike oratory, should not aim at clarity...but be dense with meaning, 'something to be chewed and digested'.

George Chapman Ovid's Banquet of Sense (1595)

I am no poet, but if you think for yourselves, as I proceed, the facts will form a poem in your minds.

Michael Faraday

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: John Cage (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.