Quotes About Language And Music

#1. I try to show what it is about language and music that enthralls, because I think those are the two elements of poetry.

Rita Dove

#2. I don't see it in terms of changing things, but rather using language and music as weapons for fighting a mainstream media which is predominately right wing, and loyal to the political framework and its corporate interests.

Thom Yorke

#3. I want to understand the piers of language and music and comprehension that can hold up a building even when what the building houses is an earthquake. This thinking must surely come into the poems I write, but more by osmosis than will.

Jane Hirshfield

#4. Besides language and music mathematics is one of the primary manifestations of the free creative power of the human mind.

Hermann Weyl

#5. In living organisms, nucleic acid molecules are the only indefinite hereditary replicators, or at least they were until the invention of language and music.

John Maynard Smith

#6. There is language going on out there- the language of the wild. Roars, snorts, trumpets, squeals, whoops, and chirps all have meaning derived over eons of expression ... We have yet to become fluent in the language -and music- of the wild.

Boyd Norton

#7. We are a spectacular, splendid manifestation of life. We have language ... We have affection. We have genes for usefulness, and usefulness is about as close to a 'common goal' of nature as I can guess at.

Lewis Thomas

#8. Since music is the only language with the contradictory attributes of being intelligible and untranslatable, the musical creator is a being comparable to the gods, and music itself the supreme mystery of the science of man.

Claude Levi-Strauss

#9. 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

#10. It was made clear to me that Music is related to everything, especially nature and language, but in order to speak it naturally, I had to first make myself a part of it.

Victor L. Wooten

#11. Mostly, I'm drawn to great characters and great worlds that use weird things for their language - whether it's dance, whether it's pop music with Justin Bieber, or whether it's magic.

Daniel Radcliffe

#12. I look forward to my first visit to Israel. Music is a universal language that is meant to unify audiences in peace and love, and that is the spirit of our show.

Alicia Keys

#13. Music is a language that speaks to people emotions.

The Unknown

#14. There are Latino people in our world who believe strongly that if you are Latino you should speak the language, you should eat the food, you should listen to the music, you should be proud. And when you don't do those things, some people will look at it as if you're neglecting who you are.

Selenis Leyva

#15. Music is a language - and language, at its finest, should be music.

T.L. Rese

#16. 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

#17. That old adage, that "music is a universal language", is really true. Even if all of the lyrics are understood, they seem to connect with it really well and in some ways, more so.

William Fitzsimmons

#18. Language must resound with all the harmonies of music. The writer must always, at all times, find the tremulous word which captures the thing and is able to draw a sob from my soul by its very rightness.

Knut Hamsun

#19. I think records and music are more appropriate and more respectful of the human soul than the churches are. And more respectful of the needs of humans to communicate with the aspects of themselves that are neglected by language.

Will Oldham

#20. Music speaks from spirit to spirit and in that sense you could call it a true spiritual language.

John McLaughlin

#21. Music, for centuries and centuries, was used to teach everything. It was used to teach language, mathematics, history. The news was music. Everything traveled by song. It was used to teach ethics. It was used to create conscience, probably more than anything.

T Bone Burnett

#22. We probably, as primitive people, made music before we actually had a language, and that's where language comes from.

Debbie Harry

#23. I decided to come back and teach goodness in this business. To teach love, because music is the universal language. We are God's bouquet, and through music we become one.

Little Richard

#24. Our sense of what American English is has upended our relationship to articulateness, our approach to writing, and how (and whether) we impart it to the young, our interest in poetry, and our conception of what it is, and even our response to music and how we judge it.

John McWhorter

#25. Music is the language of the soul; and for two people of different nations or races to unite, there is no better means than music

Hazrat Inayat Khan

#26. The language of soul ... possesses a pronounced lyrical quality which is frequently incompatible to any music other than that ceaseless and relentlessly driving rhythm that flows from poignantly spent ideas.

Claude Brown

#27. The saxophone does not speak that language. The saxophone speaks the language of the underground, the jaded melancholy of the half-light - grimy and sexy and sweaty and hard. It is the language of orphans and bastards and whores.

Eleanor Catton

#28. What I love about Sonny's playing is that he is so inventive within the mainstream Jazz vernacular. Because he knows so many ways to deal with musical material, he is never repetitive and hasn't had to invent a new language. Also, he never asked me to do anything but swing!

Pete La Roca

#29. Music is 'significant form,' and its significance is that of a symbol, a highly articulated, sensuous object, which by virtue of its dynamic structure can express the forms of vital experience which language is peculiarly unfit to convey. Feeling, life, motion and emotion constitute its import.

Susanne Katherina Langer

#30. There's always so much more that can be conveyed on screen visually in the expressions of people's faces, in their bodies, in their body language. And also with sound design, with music.

Lynn Shelton

#31. For music alone can abolish differences
of language or culture between two people and invoke something indestructible within them.

Irene Nemirovsky

#32. 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

#33. Classical music is a special taste like Greek language or pre-Columbian archeology, not a common culture of reciprocal communication and psychological shorthand.

Allan Bloom

#34. English is really free for me; there's no limits to the music and the imagination. And French, it's just I live in Paris, and it's really a poetic language where you can really play with words.

Yael Naim

#35. I am a very simple man. I am a man first, an artist second. My first obligation is to the welfare of my fellow man. I will endeavour to meet this obligation through music, since it transcends language, politics and national boundaries.

Pablo Casals

#36. Celtic music is part of the language in Scotland and Ireland, where every kid and grandparent knows those songs, music by the likes of Woody Guthrie and Hank Snow is getting entrenched here. They are part of our cultural language. It's part of a living treasure. It doesn't just belong to a museum.

Rosanne Cash

#37. Music is so hard to talk about in many ways, It communicates beyond what our language can put across, and having to sit there and analyze it and talk about it is a struggle for me.

Jeff Martin

#38. Pop music has greater power to change people and to affect people because it's a universal language. You don't have to understand music to understand the power of a pop song.

Paul Epworth

#39. Music is not a language. Any musical piece is akin to a boulder with complex forms, with striations and engraved designs atop and within, which men can decipher in a thousand different ways without ever finding the right answer or the best one ...

Iannis Xenakis

#40. Music is essentially an emotional language, so you want to feel something from the relationships and build music based on those feelings.

Howard Shore

#41. Poetry uses language to create a music borne inside human experiences and emotions.

Pattiann Rogers

#42. I feel that music is more flexible than language and your song, or "piece" is only as flexible as your least flexible component.

Brian Chippendale

#43. People in day-to-day life tend to skim the surface of things and be polite and careful, and that's not the language I speak. I like talking about feelings, fears and memories, anguish and joy, and I find it in music.

Shirley Manson

#44. With music, you can create instant trust with an audience. You can hear three notes, and you surrender to it, whereas it takes you about ten minutes of language before people begin to trust you in a play.

George C. Wolfe

#45. We think that this is just our world and we don't know what other people are thinking. Music actually is a phenomenal connector in that respect. It's a special language that defines certain boundaries and connects people in a particular way, a very emotional way, I have found.

Annie Lennox

#46. Musicians are often asked to answer for an entire culture, or for an entire movement. It's a process of commodification. It becomes packaged and summarized in a word like 'emo' or 'grunge' ... or 'folk music.' I think that's just language itself, trying to understand the mysteries of the world.

Sufjan Stevens

#47. I think it's really important these days to be able to relate to how the music flows and be able to speak the same language as your bandmates and the producer, rather than just talking drums.

Matt Cameron

#48. Music is the one universal language. It's your best friend when the chips are down, and it's better than any energy drink when you're feeling it.

Dave Smalley

#49. I've been in situations like in Tokyo where people sang my song word for word and then when the music stopped, they couldn't speak to me. I've seen the music break the language barrier.

Curtis Jackson

#50. One of the most important differences I see between prose and poetry is the music of the language.

Pattiann Rogers

#51. I always read poetry before I write, to sensitize me to the rhythms and music of language.

Janet Fitch

#52. Poetry is a second translation of the soul's feeling; it must be rendered into thought, and thought must change its nebulous robe of semi-wording into definite language, before it reaches another heart. Music is a first translation of feeling, needing no second, but entering the heart direct.

Frances Ridley Havergal

#53. The language of film is further and further away from the language of theater and is closer to music. It's abstract but still narrative.

Emmanuel Lubezki

#54. In these days of political, personal and economic disintegration, music is not a luxury, it's a necessity; not simply because it is therapeutic, nor because it is the universal language, but because it is the persistent focus of our intelligence, aspiration and goodwill.

Robert Shaw

#55. I think in Baroque music, especially in the case of Bach, what really transformed Bach's musical language, what changed it for him was hearing Vivaldi, hearing the sort of manipulation of small cells of information and patterns in order to generate sort of huge blocks of harmony.

Mahan Esfahani

#56. I believe that music is a spiritual language. My everyday self is pretty mundane and boring, but when I'm making music it allows for me to communicate a kind of transcendence that I can't communicate otherwise.

Sufjan Stevens

#57. Make it, not make it? What's the difference? Music is a language, it's a dance of life, and it can be a part of your life without being something that earns.

Tina Weymouth

#58. I find in music there's a space and a language I can use to express things in ways I can't describe conversationally.

Sufjan Stevens

#59. Because it exists as a living sonority, music is animated by voices, and these voices do not evaporate when music confronts the insights of contemporary literary criticism, or philosophy of language.

Carolyn Abbate

#60. First I think I was interested in the stories, and later on, I became more interested in the language itself, so the stories became almost secondary, but it was kind of a background music for my life.

Tom Robbins

#61. Music really did mean something to him, he realized, and it always had. It called to him, although there were no words to describe what it promised. It was like a secret language he never forgot how to speak, a hometown he could always return to when he tired of what life was throwing at him.

Tad Williams

#62. It is the body, subject to the harmony of the steps it is executing, which speaks. And it speaks to the heart in as direct a language as does music.

Natalia Makarova

#63. Music was language in our house. It was air ... I feel certain that if I absorbed any lessons at all in the first months and years of my life, they must have been about the work that went into making a beautiful sound.

Renee Fleming

#64. For centuries, everything was taught through music. History was taught through music; language and mathematics were taught through music.

T Bone Burnett

#65. Genius is not a matter of intelligence, but of spirit; and we cannot speak accurately of the spirit in any language but music.

Kim Stanley Robinson

#66. Music is an incomparably more powerful means and is a subtler language for expressing the thousand different moments of the soul's moods.

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky

#67. And I have a dream of a New American Language, one with a little bit more Spanish. I have a dream of a new pop music, that tells the truth with a good beat and some nice harmonies.

Dan Bern

#68. Art works because it appeals to certain faculties of the mind. Music depends on details of the auditory system, painting and sculpture on the visual system. Poetry and literature depend on language.

Steven Pinker

#69. He wanted to cry quietly but not for himself: for the words, so beautiful and sad, like music.

James Joyce

#70. Language is in the way. Music's in the way. Songs are in the way. Stuff's in the way. That's just our state here. And to acknowledge that we're broken and to even ... create tradition that helps us embrace that, and to understand that, I think is a very healthy, good thing.

Crowder

#71. Dance music is no longer a simple Donna Summer beat. It's become a whole language that I find fascinating and exciting. Eventually, it will lose the dance tag and join the fore of rock.

David Bowie

#72. Music is truly the universal language, and when it is excellently expressed how deeply it moves our souls

David O. McKay

#73. Profound music leads us beyond language ... to the dark roots of our scream and the celestial heights of our silence.

Cornel West

#74. The art of music, rather more daughter than imitator of nature, in her impressive and mysterious language minding and educating us, rouses directly our temper and rules us to the depths of our souls.

Carl Maria Von Weber

#75. Poems have a different music from ordinary language, and every poem has a different kind of music of necessity, and that's, in a way, the hardest thing about writing poetry is waiting for that music, and sometimes you never know if it's going to come.

C. K. Williams

#76. When words fail to express the exalted sentiments and finer emotions of the human heart, music becomes the sublimated language of the soul, the divine instrumentality for its higher utterance.

Hans Hinrich Wendt

#77. Language is not subtle enough, tender enough, to express all that we feel; and when language fails, the highest and deepest longings are translated into music. Music is the sunshine - the climate - of the soul, and it floods the heart with a perfect June.

Robert Green Ingersoll

#78. The way that I approached numbers, think about them, the same as for language as well-acquiring vocabulary, understanding the grammar, the structures of languages, the rhythm, the music and so-on - these things obviously evolved.

Daniel Tammet

#79. Hip-hop started as this niche moment, and the values of it, the cultures that it carried on its back; language, clothes, the way you wear your clothes, the items that you consume, all came with the music as an art form. And those things helped transform how people buy, shop, speak, engage.

Steve Stoute

#80. I think going from doing TV and straight plays to Shakespeare is weird enough because you have this heightened language, and you are telling a story through metric poetry. But I think music is that place beyond poetry.

Tamsin Greig

#81. Every country can be defined through their food, their music and their language. That's the soul of a country.

Quincy Jones

#82. I can use movie as a language. Not only could it send a good message, I could let people know about my thinking and how I see the world, how I see the colour, how I see the music, how I see everything.

John Woo

#83. When you're on stage, the audience becomes your other half. It's the ultimate high you can reach as a musician - an incredible feeling. And no matter where I am it's still the same; there's a reason we call music the universal language.

Laura Branigan

#84. Music is thousands and thousands of years old and I don't think that basic, primitive connection to the language of music ever changes.

Spike Jonze

#85. I distrust speech therapy. Words are the language of lies and evasions. Music cannot lie. Music talks to the heart.

Alasdair Gray

#86. Music expresses feeling and thought, without language; it was below and before speech, and it is above and beyond all words.

Robert G. Ingersoll

#87. Because music is a language unto itself, when I'm writing, I need silence. I need to hear the music and the rhythms of the words inside my thoughts.

Marianne Wiggins

#88. Notes and chords have become my second language and, more often than not, that vocabulary expresses what I feel when language fails me. The guitar is my conscience, too - whenever I've lost my way, it's brought me back to center; whenever I forget, it reminds me why I'm here.

Slash, Anthony Bozza

#89. I've always envied people who compose music or paint, because they don't have to be bothered with the sort of crude mess that language normally is, in everyday life and in the way we use it.

Franz Wright

#90. I wanted to capture the excitement of house music, almost like a four-four beat, and the best way to do that was to use a language that was rhythmic and performative.

Irvine Welsh

#91. Poetry is the language of the soul;
Poetic Prose, the language of my heart.
Each line must flow as in a song,
and strike a chord that rings forever.
To me, words are music!

Lori R. Lopez

#92. 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

#93. I've always loved music and I love the language, which is a huge reason why I'm part of theater.

Mos Def

#94. Music has always been a big part of my life, it moves me, it educates me and it makes me grow. It is a fantastic language to help you explore ideas.

Planningtorock

#95. The music takes over the words and makes them speak to me in another language.

Roger Scruton

#96. Music is the language of the soul. It touches our deepest perceptions of being. Everyone understands music in his or her own way. Even animals understand music and respond to it with deep appreciation and love.

Debasish Mridha

#97. When God created Man, he gave him Music as a language different from all other languages. And early man sang his glory in the wilderness; and drew the hearts of kings and moved them from their thrones.

Khalil Gibran

#98. I enjoy reading about the lives of musicians, and find many similarities in their ideas of preparation and their utter devotion to this great, eternal language: music.

Jessye Norman

#99. Music is the language of the soul, the voice of the heart, and a message from the eternity.

Debasish Mridha

#100. The known world shrinks and vanishes, and the soul hurls itself into the uncharted distances of the unknown where everything is strange and yet familiar, and the language of music, of poets, and of dreams is spoken.

Hermann Hesse