“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.”
Source: Silence: Lectures and Writings
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John Cage 43
American avant-garde composer 1912–1992Related quotes

from: English Wikipedia, Joan Miró, 1958, as quoted in Twentieth-Century Artists on Art, ed. Dore Ashton, 1986
1940 - 1960

Letter to Michael van der Peet (September 1979), quoted in "Mother Teresa Did Not Feel Christ's Presence for Last Half of Her Life, Letters Reveal", Fox News (24 August 2007) http://www.foxnews.com/story/2007/08/24/mother-teresa-did-not-feel-christ-presence-for-last-half-her-life-letters/
1970s
Context: Jesus has a very special love for you. As for me, the silence and emptiness is so great that I look and do not see, listen and do not hear. The tongue moves but does not speak.

quote, p. 384
posthumous publications, El Lissitzky, El Lissitzky : Life, Letters, Texts (1967; 1980)

“If emptiness is empty, how can something be borne or awaken from it?”
"The Sign and Emptiness," p. 9
The Sign and Its Children (2000), Sequence: “The Supreme Sign”

"The Blank Page"
Last Tales (1957)
Context: Why, you are to become a story teller, and I shall give you the reasons! Hear then: Where the storyteller is loyal, eternally and unswervingly loyal to the story, there, in the end, silence will speak. Where the story has been betrayed, silence is but emptiness. But we, the faithful, when we have spoken our last word, will hear the voice of silence. Whether a small snotty lass understands it or not.