Quotes from Claude Debussy

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

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

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

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.

Art is the most beautiful of all lies.

music is the arithmetic of sounds as optics is the geometry of light

A beautiful sunset that was mistaken for a dawn.

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

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

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

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

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 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.

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.

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

Art is of absolutely no use to the masses

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

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

La musique doit humblement chercher à faire plaisir, l'extrême complication est le contraire de l'art

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

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

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 deception of all!