Claude Debussy Quotes
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Music expresses the motion of the waters, the play of curves described by changing breezes.
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Search for a discipline within freedom! Don't let yourelf be governed by formulae drawn from decadent philosophies: they are for the feeble-minded. Listen to no one's advice except that of the wind in the trees. That can recount the whole history of mankind...
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Every sound perceived by the acute ear in the rhythm of the world about us can be represented musically. Some people wish above all to conform to the rules, I wish only to render what I can hear.
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First of all, ladies and gentlemen, you must forget that you are singers.
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Music is the arithmetic of sounds as optics is the geometry of light.
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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. … Let us not disillusion anyone by bringing too much reality into the dream.
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Music is the space between the notes.
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Works of art make rules but rules do not make works of art.
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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.
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How much has to be explored and discarded before reaching the naked flesh of feeling.
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The worship of Adonis is united with that of Christ.
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People don't very much like things that are beautiful - they are so far from their nasty little minds.
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A beautiful sunset that was mistaken for a dawn.
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Music is a mysterious mathematical process whose elements are part of Infinity. … 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.
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Composers aren't daring enough. They're afraid of that sacred idol called 'common sense', which is the most dreadful thing I know - after all, it's no more than a religion founded to excuse the ubiquity of imbeciles!
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Music should humbly seek to please; within these limits great beauty may perhaps be found. Extreme complication is contrary to art. 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.
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Is it not our duty to find the symphonic formula which fits our time, one which progress, daring and modern victory demand? The century of airplanes has a right to its own music.
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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.
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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 may happen.
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To complete a work is just like being present at the death of someone you love.
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What I am trying to do is something different - an effect of reality, but what some fools call Impressionism, a term that is usually misapplied, especially by the critics who don't hesitate to apply it to Turner, the greatest creator of mysterious effects in the whole world of art.
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The colour of my soul is iron-grey and sad bats wheel about the steeple of my dreams.
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The music I desire must be supple enough to adapt itself to the lyrical effusions of the soul and the fantasy of dreams.
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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.