Claude Debussy Quotes

“A beautiful sunset that was mistaken for a dawn.”

“An artist is by definition a man accustomed to dreaming and who lives among ghosts.”

“Anyone who calls my music 'impressionist' is an imbecile.”

“Art is of absolutely no use to the masses.”

“Art is the most beautiful deception of all. And although people try to incorporate the everyday events of life in it, we must hope that it will remain a deception lest it become a utilitarian thing, sad as a factory.”

“Art is the most beautiful of all lies.”

“Beauty must appeal to the senses, must provide us with immediate enjoyment, must impress us or insinuate itself into us without any effort on our part.”

“Collect impressions. Don't be in a hurry to write them down. Because that's something music can do better than painting: it can centralise variations of colour and light within a single picture a truth generally ignored, obvious as it is.”

“Extreme complication is contrary to art.”

“First of all, ladies and gentlemen, you must forget that you are singers.”

“How much has to be explored and discarded before reaching the naked flesh of feeling.”

“I am more and more convinced that music is not, in essence, a thing which can be cast into a traditional and fixed form. It is made up of colors and rhythms.”

“I love music passionately. And because I love it I try to free it from barren traditions that stifle it.”

“I wish to sing of my interior visions with the naive candour of a child.”

“If I am not making music, I have no reason for existing.”

“In opera, there is always too much singing.”

“It is necessary to abandon yourself completely, and let the music do as it will with you. All people come to music to seek oblivion.”

“Life is the space between our things.”

“Listen to no one's advice except that of the wind in the trees. That can recount the whole history of mankind.”

“Music begins where words are powerless to express. Music is made for the inexpressible. I want music to seem to rise from the shadows and indeed sometimes to return to them.”

“Music is the arithmetic of sounds as optics is the geometry of light.”

“Music is the expression of the movement of the waters, the play of curves described by changing breezes.”

“Music is the silence between the notes.”

“Music should humbly seek to please, extreme complication is the opposite of art.”

“People come to music to seek oblivion: is that not also a form of deception?”

“People don't very much like things that are beautiful... they are so far from their nasty little minds.”

“Proust is long-winded, precious, and a bit of an old woman.”

“Some people wish above all to conform to the rules, I wish only to render what I can hear.

There is no theory. You have only to listen. Pleasure is the law.”

“The attraction of the virtuoso for the public is very like that of the circus for the crowd. There is always the hope that something dangerous will happen.”

“The century of airplanes has a right to its own music.”