Claude Debussy's Quotes

Works of art make rules; rules do not make works of art.

Claude Debussy

Art is the most beautiful of all lies.

Claude Debussy

Extreme complication is contrary to art.

Claude Debussy

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

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.

Claude Debussy

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

Claude Debussy

Music is the silence between the notes.

Claude Debussy

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

Claude Debussy

The century of airplanes has a right to its own music.

Claude Debussy

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

Claude Debussy

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.

Claude Debussy

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.

Claude Debussy