Quotes by Claude Debussy

• Music is the silence between the notes.
• Works of art make rules; rules do not make works of art.
• 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.
• The century of airplanes has a right to its own music.
• 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.
• People come to music to seek oblivion: is that not also a form of deception?
• Music is the expression of the movement of the waters, the play of curves described by changing breezes.
• Music is the arithmetic of sounds as optics is the geometry of light.
• In opera, there is always too much singing.
• 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.
• 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.
• I wish to sing of my interior visions with the naive candour of a child.
• A beautiful sunset that was mistaken for a dawn.
• Art is the most beautiful of all lies.
• 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.
• Extreme complication is contrary to art.
• First of all, ladies and gentlemen, you must forget that you are singers.
• How much has to be explored and discarded before reaching the naked flesh of feeling.
• I love music passionately. And because I love it I try to free it from barren traditions that stifle it.