Claude Debussy
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.Collection: Art
Art is the most beautiful of all lies.Collection: Art
Works of art make rules; rules do not make works of art.Collection: Art
People come to music to seek oblivion: is that not also a form of deception?Collection: Music
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.Collection: Nature
Music is the silence between the notes.Collection: Music
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.Collection: Hope
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.Collection: Beauty
I love music passionately. And because I love it I try to free it from barren traditions that stifle it.Collection: Music
A beautiful sunset that was mistaken for a dawn.
Music is the expression of the movement of the waters, the play of curves described by changing breezes.
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.
Music is the arithmetic of sounds as optics is the geometry of light.
In opera, there is always too much singing.
The century of airplanes has a right to its own music.
How much has to be explored and discarded before reaching the naked flesh of feeling.
I wish to sing of my interior visions with the naive candour of a child.
Extreme complication is contrary to art.
First of all, ladies and gentlemen, you must forget that you are singers.
Music is the space between the notes.Collection: Music
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.Collection: Shadow
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.Collection: Dream
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.Collection: Music
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.Collection: Children
Works of art make rules but rules do not make works of art.Collection: Art
There is nothing more musical than a sunset.Collection: Sunset
Anyone who calls my music "impressionist" is an imbecile.Collection: Imbeciles
Listen to no one's advice except that of the wind in the trees. That can recount the whole history of mankind.Collection: Wind
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.Collection: People
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.Collection: Color
On those who overanalyze his music: When you tear the wings off a butterfly, it is no longer a butterflyCollection: Teaching
Art is the most beautiful deception of all!Collection: Beautiful
The trouble with the opera is there's always to much singing.Collection: Singing
Life is the space between our things.Collection: Space
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.Collection: Writing
If I am not making music, I have no reason for existing.Collection: Music
To complete a work is just like being present at the death of someone you love.Collection: Someone You Love
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.Collection: Beautiful
When Claude Debussy studied at the Paris Conservatory from age ten to age twenty-two, many considered him a rebel because of his treatment of dissonance and his disdain for the established forms. He reputedly turned to a fellow student during a performance of Beethoven with the words, "Let's go. He's starting to develop.Collection: Two
When asked by a grumpily puzzled professor what "rules" he followed, Debussy is said to have retorted, mon plaisir "whatever I please" and he further claimed that more was to be gained by watching the sun rise than by listening to the Pastoral Symphony. Although such remarks were intended to shock, they contain a core of Debussyan verity.Collection: Past
People don't very much like things that are beautiful - they are so far from their nasty little minds.Collection: Beautiful
Beauty seems to strike some people as a personal affront.Collection: People
There is no theory. You merely have to listen. Pleasure is the law.Collection: Law
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.Collection: Beautiful
The colour of my soul is iron-grey and sad bats wheel about the steeple of my dreams.Collection: Dream
Some people wish above all to conform to the rules, I wish only to render what I can hear.Collection: Law
[on Richard Wagner] A beautiful sunset that was mistaken for a dawn.Collection: Beautiful
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!Collection: Idols
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.Collection: Art
Inspiration and ideas only come to me when I have not had a woman in a very long time... Ballads, polonaises, even a whole concerto may have been lost forever up your des durka, I can't tell you how many. I have been so deeply engulfed in my love for you I have hardly created anything.Collection: Love