Claude Debussy Quotes

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

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

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

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...

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.

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.

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.

Which composers?” “Claude Debussy, Erik Satie, and Maurice Ravel are my favorites.

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

Art is the most beautiful of all lies

When it came to the realm of creativity, I was basically facing a pure nothingness. When Claude Debussy had writer’s block while composing an opera, he wrote, “Day after day I produce rien—nothingness.” That summer was the same for me—day after day I took part in producing nothingness.

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

Those around me persist in not understanding that I have never been able to live in a real world of people and things. And that is why I have this irrefutable need to escape and become involved in adventures which seem inexplicable because they involve a man no one recognizes. And perhaps that is what is best in me! Besides, an artist by definition is a man accustomed to dreams and who lives among phantoms. . . . How could it be expected that this same person would be able to follow in his daily life the strict observance of traditions— laws and other barriers erected by a hypocritical and cowardly world. (Letter from Claude Debussy to Jacques Durand)

Claude Debussy mixed with the California wind, which made for the most incredible soundtrack for our drive.

It is the space between the notes that makes the music

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

The century of airplanes deserves its own music. As there are no precedents, I must create anew.

Sous une reproduction d’un Botero, une petite étagère garde précieusement une collection de livres des cuisines du monde et quelques guides sur les vins de France. Rien d’autre n’apparaît comme décoration. Pas d’autres livres, pas de disques, rien. Il y règne une ambiance minimaliste, sereine et aseptisée. Pas de musique, non plus. Le genre d’ambiance où Claude Debussy aurait sa place, mais il n’en est rien.

A música é o silêncio entre as notas. — CLAUDE DEBUSSY

Claude Debussy’s father had plans for his son to become a sailor but Claude, at the age of eight, was described by his sister as spending “whole days sitting on a chair thinking, no one knew of what”.

The soul of another is a dark forest in which one must tread carefully. Letter, 1891 Claude Debussy

Dueling was accepted in artistic circles as well with the young Marcel Proust challenging a critic of his work while Claude Debussy drew a challenge from the Belgian writer Maurice Maeterlinck for not casting his mistress in Debussy’s opera Pelléas et Mélisande, for which Maeterlinck had written the libretto.14 In Germany Kessler challenged a bureaucrat who blamed him for a scandal caused by a show of Rodin drawings of naked young men. The only European country where dueling was no longer accepted as something that gentlemen did was Great Britain. But then, as the Kaiser was fond of saying, the British were a nation of shopkeepers.

It was not until 1869 that Claude Monet became a friend of Edouard Manet, joining Manet’s circle, which by now included Zola, Cézanne, and Degas.

La musique doit humblement chercher à faire plaisir, l'extrême complication est le contraire de l'art

In the garden of harmonies, [Debussy] selects the most beautiful flowers.