Quotes from Claude Debussy

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

A beautiful sunset that was mistaken for a dawn.

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.

Music is the space between the notes.

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

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.

On those who overanalyze his music: When you tear the wings off a butterfly, it is no longer a butterfly

Anyone who calls my music "impressionist" is an imbecile.

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

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.

In opera, there is always too much singing.

The music I desire must be supple enough to adapt itself to the lyrical effusions of the soul and the fantasy of dreams.

Music is the silence between the notes.

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

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

Life is the space between our things.

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.

Extreme complication is contrary to art.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

Works of art make rules; rules do not make works of art.