You live only once The logician would argue, You only live once should be rewritten as You live only once, with only next to the thing it qualifies, once. The logician would be unbearably pedantic, but there is a grain of good taste in the pedantry. Writing is often clearer and more elegant when a writer pushes an only or a not next to the thing that it quantifies. In 1962 John F. Kennedy declared, “We choose to go to the moon not because it is easy but because it is hard.” That sounds a lot classier than “We don’t choose to go to the moon because it is easy but because it is hard." Steven Pinker, The Sense of Style grammar
The meaning of music 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, Wittgenstein's Mistress The work is what it meansNo more than a sketchOn 'The Master and His Emissary' meaningmusic