Claude Debussy

A beautiful sunset that was mistaken for a dawn.

First of all, ladies and gentlemen, you must forget that you are singers.

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

In opera, there is always too much singing.

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

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

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.

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

I wish to sing of my interior visions with the naive candour of a child.

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.

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.

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

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 silence between the notes.

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.

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.