Claude Debussy Quotes Page 2

“The colour of my soul is iron-grey and sad bats wheel about the steeple of my dreams.”

“The sound of the sea, the curve of a horizon, wind in leaves, the cry of a bird leave manifold impression in us.

And suddenly, without our wishing it at all, one of these memories spills from us and finds expression in musical language...

I want to sing my interior landscape with the simple artlessness of a child.”

“The trouble with the opera is there's always too much singing.”

“There is no theory. You have only to listen. Pleasure is the law. I love music passionately. And because l love it, I try to free it from barren traditions that stifle it.

It is a free art gushing forth — an open-air art, boundless as the elements, the wind, the sky, the sea. It must never be shut in and become an academic art.”

“There is nothing is more musical than a sunset. He who feels what he sees will find no more beautiful example of development in all that book which, alas, musicians read but too little – the book of Nature.”

“There is nothing more musical than a sunset. He who feels what he sees will find no more beautiful example of development in all that book which, alas, musicians read but too little – the book of Nature.”

“There's never one sunrise the same or one sunset the same.”

“To complete a work is just like being present at the death of someone you love.”

“When you tear the wings off a butterfly, it is no longer a butterfly.”

“Works of art make rules but rules do not make works of art.”

“But music, don't you know, is a dream from which the veils have been lifted. It's not even the expression of a feeling, it's the feeling itself.”