Top 15 Claude Debussy Quotes

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

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

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

A beautiful sunset that was mistaken for a dawn.

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

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.

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

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 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

There's never one sunrise the same or one sunset the same.

Art is of absolutely no use to the masses

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

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

Proust is long-winded, precious, and a bit of an old woman