Claude Debussy Quotes

Quotes about:

• Music is the space between the notes.

  Claude Debussy

  Music, Art, Weekend

  "Turning Numbers into Knowledge: Mastering the Art of Problem Solving". Book by Jonathan G. Koomey (p. 96), 2001.

  129 Copy quote

• 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

  Shadow, Want, Return

  106 Copy quote

• 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

  Dream, Expression, Feelings

  Claude Debussy, François Lesure, Roger Nichols (1987). “Debussy Letters: ,”, Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press

  130 Copy quote

• 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.

  Claude Debussy

  Music, Art, Air

  141 Copy quote

• 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.

  Claude Debussy

  Children, Memories, Simple

  122 Copy quote

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

  Claude Debussy

  Art, Musician, Classical Music

  "Companion to Contemporary Musical Thought". Book by John Paynter, 1992.

  107 Copy quote

• There is nothing more musical than a sunset.

  Claude Debussy

  Sunset, Musical, Sunrise

  "The Harvard Biographical Dictionary of Music". Book by Don Michael Randel, 1996.

  1075 Copy quote

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

  Claude Debussy

  Curves, Expression, Swag

  "The Twentieth Century". Book by Caroline Farrar Ware, 1972.

  101 Copy quote

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

  Claude Debussy

  Imbeciles, Impressionists

  49 Copy quote

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

  Claude Debussy

  Wind, Tree, Advice

  "The Life of the Creative Spirit". Book by H. Charles Romesburg, 2001.

  75 Copy quote

• 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

  People, Oblivion, Abandon

  "The Cambridge Companion to Debussy". Book by Simon Trezise, 2003.

  28 Copy quote

• 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

  Color, Essence, Form

  80 Copy quote

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

  Claude Debussy

  Teaching, Butterfly, Assessment

  64 Copy quote

• Art is the most beautiful deception of all!

  Claude Debussy

  Beautiful, Art, Lying

  "The Life of the Creative Spirit". Book by H. Charles Romesburg, 2001.

  64 Copy quote

• Life is the space between our things.

  Claude Debussy

  Space, Life Is, Space Between

  16 Copy quote

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

  Claude Debussy

  Singing, Opera, Trouble

  5 Copy quote

• 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

  Writing, Light, Variation

  Claude Debussy, François Lesure, Roger Nichols (1987). “Debussy Letters: ,”, Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press

  13 Copy quote

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

  Claude Debussy

  Music, Beauty, Art

  "Greatness: Who Makes History and Why". Book by Dean Keith Simonton, May 20, 1994.

  43 Copy quote

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

  Claude Debussy

  Trying, Music Love, Tradition

  69 Copy quote

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

  Claude Debussy

  Music, Reason, No Reason

  52 Copy quote

• 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

  Philosophy, Medicine, Effort

  "French Music: From the Death of Berlioz to the Death of Fauré". Book by Martin Cooper (p. 136), 1951; later quoted in "Debussy and Wagner", book by Robin Holloway (p. 207), 1979.

  29 Copy quote

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

  Claude Debussy

  Someone You Love, One You Love

  "The Life of the Creative Spirit". Book by H. Charles Romesburg (pp. 239-240), 2001.

  26 Copy quote

• 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.

  Claude Debussy

  Beautiful, Book, Sunset

  "The Harvard Biographical Dictionary of Music". Book by Don Michael Randel, 1996.

  58 Copy quote

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

  Claude Debussy

  Sexy, Feelings, Naked

  57 Copy quote

• 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.

  Claude Debussy

  Past, Symphony, Listening

  56 Copy quote

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