Claude Debussy Quotes

Is it not our duty to find the symphonic formula which fits our time, one which progress, daring and modern victory demand? The century of airplanes has a right to its own music.

Art is of absolutely no use to the masses

Search for a discipline within freedom! Don't let yourelf be governed by formulae drawn from decadent philosophies: they are for the feeble-minded. Listen to no one's advice except that of the wind in the trees. That can recount the whole history of mankind...

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

The music I desire must be supple enough to adapt itself to the lyrical effusions of the soul and the fantasy of dreams.

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

Music would take over at the point at which words become powerless, with the one and only object of expressing that which nothing but music could express. For this, I need a text by a poet who, resorting to discreet suggestion rather than full statement, will enable me to graft my dream upon his dream — who will give me plain human beings in a setting belonging to no particular period or country. … Then I do not wish my music to drown the words, nor to delay the course of the action. I want no purely musical developments which are not called for inevitably by the text. In opera there is always too much singing. Music should be as swift and mobile as the words themselves.

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

Αν πρέπει να νικηθώ, άραγε εσύ θα είσαι ο νικητής μου;

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.

Un artiste est par définition un homme habitué au rêve et qui vit parmi des fantômes.

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

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.

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.

Music expresses the motion of the waters, the play of curves described by changing breezes.