Claude Debussy Quotes

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.

Music is the space between the notes.

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.

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.

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.

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

There is nothing more musical than a sunset.

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

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

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.

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

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

Art is the most beautiful deception of all!

The trouble with the opera is there's always to much singing.

Life is the space between our things.

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

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

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.

If I am not making music, I have no reason for existing.

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.

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

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

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