Top 100 Music Meaning Quotes
#1. That's the thing about music. You get to make it mean whatever you need it to mean.
Jessica Park
#2. Sharing music is not a crime. It shouldn't be. There should be a deeper meaning to making music than just selling downloads.
Dave Grohl
#3. If not for music, I would probably be a very frustrated scientist. It's one way to answer the question, 'What is the meaning of life?' I feel music answers it better.
Paula Cole
#4. I like the pop music, but I still want to have meaning in my music.
David Archuleta
#5. Either your understanding of the meaning of music is there from the beginning or it is not.
Gordon Getty
#6. Language can still be an adventure if we remember that words can make a kind of melody. In novels, news stories, memoirs and even to-the-point memos, music is as important as meaning. In fact, music can drive home the meaning of words.
Constance Hale
#7. I don't feel a real need to specify the meaning of something. When I was little and I was introduced to Led Zeppelin, I didn't know what a zeppelin was or who Zeppelin was or what the machine was. The real meaning is whatever feelings and memories you attach to the music.
Kyp Malone
#8. Being in love is something like poetry. Certainly, you can analyze and expound its various senses and intentions, but there is always something left over, mysteriously hovering between music and meaning.
Muriel Spark
#9. Tintinnabulation is an area I sometimes wander into when I am searching for answers - in my life, my music, my work. In my dark hours, I have the certain feeling that everything outside this one thing has no meaning.
Arvo Part
#10. Music is the biggest tool of revolution - the best way to reach out to the youth and involve them. If you can't contribute to the world with your art, I don't see the meaning of life.
Kailash Kher
#11. Her laughter was my favorite symphony.
Avijeet Das
#12. I think things can have more than one meaning and still connect with people. There's a lot of meaning to the title 'Music For People' and they're all true and they're all accurate.
Jon Crosby
#13. If you want meaning, you read poetry or a novel or something, you don't read song lyrics. You're supposed to listen to them with music.
Roddy Woomble
#14. Art and music shine a light of meaning on ordinary life, and through them we are able to confront the things that trouble us and to find consolation and peace in their presence.
Roger Scruton
#15. More significant than the fact that poets write abstrusely, painters paint abstractly, and composers compose unintelligible music is that people should admire what they cannot understand; indeed, admire that which has no meaning or principle.
Eric Hoffer
#16. Writing begins in the body, it is the music of the body, and even if the words have meaning, can sometimes have meaning, the music of the words is where the meanings begin ... Writing as a lesser form of dance.
Paul Auster
#17. Nothing is more odious than music without hidden meaning.
Frederic Chopin
#18. I don't care about wearing branded clothes or flaunting brands. But I do care about the books that I read and the music that I listen to.
Avijeet Das
#19. Whatever you do in life, there's content and form; only those two put together create special meaning of a great work of art or great interpretation of music or a great story that you tell.
Itay Talgam
#20. A poem compresses much in a small space and adds music, thus heightening its meaning.
E.B. White
#21. The muffled syllables that Nature speaks
Fill us with deeper longing for her word;
She hides a meaning that the spirit seeks,
She makes a sweeter music than is heard.
George Santayana
#23. I like a good story and I also like staring at the sea
do I have to choose between the two?
David Byrne
#24. I questioned everything about music. I think it's a strange thing standing on a stage and making music. I just questioned it always: What's music? What's the meaning of it?
Gustav Ejstes
#25. I wanted to make some music with deeper meaning mixed with the fun and cool stuff I've been doing for so long.
Princess Superstar
#26. I'm not interested in the words or the meaning of the words. I'm interested in disappearing in it completely, to not be aware of yourself at all. That's the way music works for me. It's purely emotional. It goes straight to the heart. There are no explanations. That's just it.
Karl Ove Knausgard
#27. What gives my art the most meaning is when I can connect with others through it. When people say that my music has helped them, or it makes them feel good, or it inspires them, that is what gives my art lasting meaning to me.
Lindsey Stirling
#28. The music plays ... and your sense of reality is heightened to a dream.
David Mutti Clark
#29. God created music as a common language for all men. It inspires the poets, the composers and the architects. It lures us to search our souls for the meaning of the mysteries described in ancient books.
Khalil Gibran
#30. It has been said with some meaning that if men would but rest in silence, they might always hear the music of the spheres.
Arthur Helps
#31. The music is the imperative. It has the upper hand. I think all music, even though it's an abstraction, does motivate a particular meaning. Then it's the job of the musician to honor that meaning and to somehow implement lyrical material that can accommodate that emotional environment.
Sufjan Stevens
#32. When I write I like to give equal justice to lyrics, too. I want the song to have meaning for me so I can make it have meaning for the audience.
Oliver
#33. Death is not necessarily what gives meaning to life LIFE gives meaning to life, and what we do with life, which is to create knowledge like music, art, science To this end, I believe intelligent life might be evolution's secret weapon: the ultimate hack that might help us transcend entropy.
Jason Silva
#34. Everyone's just extracting meaning and feeling and emotion from almost every aspect of music, and I think that for me, it's a huge antidote to that to have a concept album.
Aimee Mann
#35. Music (Definition; Noun): The artistic organization of sound for the joy and experience of listening.
Duane Hewitt
#36. A good poem contains both meaning and music
Eve Merriam
#37. I've been very lucky to work with many amazing animators and directors who can interpret and extend the music I make. When it's done well, it can create extra meaning and new context for the song.
Gotye
#38. If Balanchine had any secret, it was one that has endured through two hundred years of classical ballet. It is that dancing correctly in three dimensions, on the music, creates the fourth dimension of meaning.
Arlene Croce
#39. When someone asks me what a song is about, it's like, I feel like I might ruin it if you ask me that. I feel like I did my best to explain the song in the song on its own terms as a song.
Kyle Morton
#40. The way the music was written seemed to be individualized, meaning that each person that listened to the music heard something different; it just depended on what they were going through in their own lives.
Jamie Magee
#41. We love to learn because learning feels good. It both satisfies and stimulates curiosity. Reading a good book, having a meaningful conversation, listening to great music - just doing these things make us happy. They have no extrinsic purpose. To give them one takes away from their joy.
Zander Sherman
#42. What does this beauty or than music mean to you? You cannot see the waves rolling up the beach or hear their roar. What do they mean to you?' In the most evident sense they mean everything. I cannot fathom or define their meaning any more than I can fathom or define love or religion or goodness.
Helen Keller
#43. As I define it, rock and roll is dead. The attitude isn't dead, but the music is no longer vital. It doesn't have the same meaning. The attitude, though, is still very much alive - and it still informs other kinds of music.
David Byrne
#44. There's so much chaos in life, I think I make music to make things feel calm and sane, to define something, to bring some meaning into it - it's a real peaceful thing to me.
Bill Callahan
#45. The touch of an infinite mystery passes over the trivial and the familiar, making it break out into ineffable music ... The trees, the stars, and the blue hills ache with a meaning which can never be uttered in words.
Rabindranath Tagore
#46. A fine poem combines the elements of meaning, music, and a form like a living frame that holds it together.
Arnold Adoff
#47. If you really understand the meaning of be-bop, you understand the meaning of freedom.
Thelonious Monk
#48. Language in fiction is made up of equal parts meaning and music. The sentences should have rhythm and cadence, they should engage and delight the inner ear.
Michael Cunningham
#49. Into the day as by dream I swim
To the music of nourished meaning.
Dejan Stojanovic
#50. Isn't it funny the way some combinations of words can give you
almost apart from their meaning
a thrill like music?
C.S. Lewis
#51. I've been given an opportunity to greatly impact people's lives through music. I want people to truly experience my heart, to connect with them on an emotional level and sing songs that bring meaning to their lives.
Ben Utecht
#52. Everybody has the blues. Everybody longs for meaning. Everybody needs to love and be loved. Everybody needs to clap hands and be happy. Everybody longs for faith. In music, especially this broad category called jazz, there is a stepping-stone to all of these.
Martin Luther King Jr.
#53. The private reader of listener can become an executant of felt meaning when he learns the poem or the musical passage by heart. To learn by heart is to afford the text or music an indwelling clarity and life-force.
George Steiner
#54. If you don't appreciate all genres, then you'll never experience the true meaning and beauty of music.
Jon Luvelli
#55. A film is - or should be - more like music than like fiction. It should be a progression of moods and feelings. The theme, what's behind the emotion, the meaning, all that comes later.
Stanley Kubrick
#56. There's no meaning to life without music. Everybody has their own connect with music.
Kailash Kher
#57. Telling someone about what a symbol means is like telling someone how music should make them feel.
Dan Brown
#58. The basic idea of a hyper instrument is where the technology is built right into the instrument so that the instrument knows how it's being played - literally what the expression is, what the meaning is, what the direction of the music is.
Tod Machover
#59. Words when spoken out loud for the sake of performance are music. They have rhythm and pitch and timbre and volume. These are the properties of music and music has the ability to find us and move us and lift us up in ways that literal meaning can't.
Josiah Bartlett
#60. Sometimes language can't even read the music of meaning.
David Mitchell
#61. I never work with music. I hate background music, always did. I only like music in the foreground, meaning, deliberately listen to it, actually.
David Hockney
#62. The whole problem can be stated quite simply by asking, 'Is there a meaning to music?' My answer would be, 'Yes.' And 'Can you state in so many words what the meaning is?' My answer to that would be, 'No'.
Aaron Copland
#63. The profound meaning of music's essential aim ... is to produce a communion, a union of man with his fellow man with the Supreme Being
Igor Stravinsky
#64. Is there a meaning to music? Yes. Can you state in so many words what the meaning is? No.
Aaron Copland
#65. Music and language are a vital element. We, as actors and directors, offer it to people who want to experience it. Sometimes the actual meaning is less important than the words themselves.
Kenneth Branagh
#66. Everything on the radio is crap ... It's fast food for your ears. It doesn't make you think. It isn't even about anything - not anything real. Don't you think music should say something?
Hannah Harrington
#67. Music is not technique and melody, but the meaning of life itself, infinitely sorrowful and unbearably beautiful.
Pearl S. Buck
#68. Hip hop is still strong. As an art form, music helps people express themselves, find meaning in their own lives and connect with their tribes.
Erik Parker
#69. It comes back to the same old question people are always asking me: 'When are you going to do a solo record?' Well, if I did, it would probably be similar to 'Baluchitherium,' meaning it would be Van Halen music - which I write anyway - but without singing.
Eddie Van Halen
#70. I see you better in music, I hear you better in wind, I feel you more in a flooding moonlight, that understands nothing, but darkness and silence.
Anthony Liccione
#71. To all that he touched he gave a new meaning, a new color, a new outline, a new loveliness, and a new poignancy.
Frederick Delius
#72. There's so much you can do with laying words on a bed of music. You can completely change their meaning with the type of music or the way they're sung.
P.J. Harvey
#73. In nearly all ballads, the words set the mood and meaning, while the music intensifies or enhances them.
Kate Smith
#74. My training in music and composition then led me to a kind of musical language process in which, for example, the sound of the words I play with has to expose their true meaning against their will so to speak.
Elfriede Jelinek
#75. Music gives us a language that cuts across the disciplines, helps us to see connections and brings a more coherent meaning to our world.
Ernest L. Boyer
#76. The thing I like about 'Nashville,' it just happens to be about musicians, and all the music is practical, meaning it's performed at a concert or during a rehearsal.
Will Chase
#77. In music, you can use metaphors with ease - if a person doesn't understand the parable, they can still enjoy the melody of the music. If, however, a person reads a book and misses the meaning of its metaphors, this will be extremely disheartening for both the reader as well as the author.
Cat Stevens
#78. It's no accident that Op. 111 attracts literary attention. Though it's music, it doesn't quite behave like it. It seems to be charged with meaning, to communicate in symbols, ciphers, clues.
Jeremy Denk
#79. All roads for me lead back to Mozart. In his tragically short life, he breathed new life, fire and meaning into every form of music that existed in his time.
Charles Hazlewood
#80. Their curses were not aimed at any definite target: they swore at such abstractions as God, the Officers, the Mothers of Others, with more music than meaning.
Mario Vargas-Llosa
#81. This is why the classical of the jazz music station plays?
to give a ground of meaning to our pain?
Adrienne Rich
#82. I think meaning is something that's really unnecessary in music, at least for me.
Tim Rutili
#83. The hardest of all the arts to speak of is music, because music has no meaning to speak of.
Ned Rorem
#84. It's impossible for me to think of music as a contest. All of the awards ceremonies, I mean I'm sure they're fun for people, but they have no meaning to me.
Greg Brown
#86. The realisation that, depending on where we changed from one note to the next in a melodic line, the music could subtly influence the entire meaning of a scene in so many ways was like a door opening to this amazing new world for me.
Steven Price
#87. And to understand this, I think this is a most important point where I would like always to be understood what we do with the New York Philharmonic. That the meaning of the music is number one.
Kurt Masur
#88. The reading of the song is vital. The written word is first always ... first. Not belittling the music, but it really is a backdrop. To convey the meaning of a song you need to look at the lyric and understand it.
Frank Sinatra
#89. Our music has depth, and attempts philosophical thought and meaning with discussions of infinity, eternity and mortality. There is a line which people cross that turns it into some magical, mystical realm, for which I dont claim responsibility and dont hold any great truck with.
David Gilmour
#90. Nobody talks about music as having intrinsic meaning, how it engages the mind.
Tod Machover
#91. I think the whole question of meaning in music is difficult enough even if you hear me playing live right now in the same room! What I mean and what you take from it may be two quite different things anyway.
Evan Parker
#92. We're thinking about printing the lyrics with the next record so that people can find their own meaning in them. But then they would start having a life of their own, and I think the Portishead music should stay a whole in which the lyrics come second, actually.
Beth Gibbons
#93. Meaning is always a latecomer. Beauty and music seduce us first; later ashamed of our own sensuality, we insist on meaning.
Clive Barker
#94. So long as the human spirit thrives on this planet, music in some living form will accompany and sustain it and give it expressive meaning.
Aaron Copland
#95. The meaning of song goes deep. Who in logical words can explain the effect music has on us? A kind of inarticulate, unfathomable speech, which leads us to the edge of the infinite, and lets us for a moment gaze into that!
Thomas Carlyle
#96. Music, of all the arts, stands in a special region, unlit by any star but its own, and utterly without meaning ... except its own.
Leonard Bernstein
#97. For me, the intent in a song is to sing it. I compose songs, meaning I'm writing words to be set to music; I'm intending it to not be recited. I'm a singer-songwriter, and I'm a poet, and there really isn't a contradiction, at least for me.
Cornelius Eady
#98. The finest singing, given a good voice to begin with, comes from the constant play of a fine mind upon the inner meaning of the music.
Ernest Newman
#99. When any civilization is dust and ashes," he said, "art is all that's left over. Images, words, music. Imaginative structures. Meaning - human meaning, that is - is defined by them. You have to admit that.
Margaret Atwood
#100. Once, somebody asked Robert Schumann to explain the meaning of a certain piece of music he had just played on the piano.
What Robert Schumann did was sit back down at the piano and play the piece of music again.
David Markson
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