Top 49 Claude Debussy Quotes
#1. There is no theory. You merely have to listen. Pleasure is the law.
Claude Debussy
#2. Do not allow the accents in the brass to produce space between the notes.
Claude Debussy
#3. 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.
Claude Debussy
#4. The music I desire must be supple enough to adapt itself to the lyrical effusions of the soul and the fantasy of dreams.
Claude Debussy
#5. On those who overanalyze his music: When you tear the wings off a butterfly, it is no longer a butterfly
Claude Debussy
#7. The worship of Adonis is united with that of Christ .
Claude Debussy
#8. If we look at the works of JS Bach ... on each page we discover things which we thought were born only yesterday, from delightful arabesques to an overflowing of religious feeling greater than anything we have since discovered.
Claude Debussy
#9. 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.
Claude Debussy
#10. Anyone who calls my music "impressionist" is an imbecile.
Claude Debussy
#13. 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.
Claude Debussy
#14. The century of aeroplanes deserves its own music. As there are no precedents, I must create anew.
Claude Debussy
#15. 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.
Claude Debussy
#16. How much has to be explored and discarded before reaching the naked flesh of feeling.
Claude Debussy
#17. Peter Townsend Music is the silence between the notes.. So could it be said that dance is the stillness between the steps?
Claude Debussy
#19. Listen to no one's advice except that of the wind in the trees. That can recount the whole history of mankind ...
Claude Debussy
#21. Claude Debussy was a rare phenomenon a composer profoundly and subversively revolutionary ...
Claude Debussy
#22. First of all, ladies and gentlemen, you must forget that you are singers.
Claude Debussy
#23. To complete a work is just like being present at the death of someone you love.
Claude Debussy
#24. The age of automobiles and aeroplanes cannot express itself in the same manner as did the age of the diligence.
Claude Debussy
#25. 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.
Claude Debussy
#26. Music is the arithmetic of sounds as optics is the geometry of light.
Claude Debussy
#27. 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.
Claude Debussy
#28. People don't very much like things that are beautiful.. they are so far from their nasty little minds.
Claude Debussy
#29. 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.
Claude Debussy
#30. 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.
Claude Debussy
#31. The colour of my soul is iron-grey and sad bats wheel about the steeple of my dreams.
Claude Debussy
#33. If I am not making music, I have no reason for existing.
Claude Debussy
#34. 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.
Claude Debussy
#35. People come to music to seek oblivion: is that not also a form of deception?
Claude Debussy
#36. Works of art make rules; rules do not make works of art.
Claude Debussy
#38. Beauty seems to strike some people as a personal affront.
Claude Debussy
#39. The trouble with the opera is there's always to much singing.
Claude Debussy
#40. I wish to sing of my interior visions with the naive candour of a child.
Claude Debussy
#41. Music is the expression of the movement of the waters, the play of curves described by changing breezes.
Claude Debussy
#42. The century of airplanes has a right to its own music.
Claude Debussy
#43. 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.
Claude Debussy
#44. He was the incomparable painter of mystery, silence, and the infinite, of the passing cloud, and the sunlit shimmer of the waves-subleties which none before him had been capable of suggesting.
Claude Debussy
#45. 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.
Claude Debussy
#46. 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!
Claude Debussy
#47. I love music passionately. And because I love it I try to free it from barren traditions that stifle it.
Claude Debussy
#48. 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.
Claude Debussy
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