34 quotes
I do not practise religion in accordance with the sacred rites. I have made mysterious Nature my religion.
Claude Debussy: His Life and Works (1933)
The colour of my soul is iron-grey and sad bats wheel about the steeple of my dreams.
Letter to Ernest Chausson (1894)
Music is a mysterious mathematical process whose elements are part of Infinity. … There is nothing more musical than a sunset.
The Harvard Biographical Dictionary of Music (1996)
A beautiful sunset that was mistaken for a dawn.
When I gaze at a sunset sky and spend hours contemplating its marvelous ever-changing beauty, an extraordinary emotion overwhelms me. Nature in all its vastness is truthfully reflected in my sincere though feeble soul.
Claude Debussy: His Life and Works (1933)
Music is the space between the notes.
Turning Numbers into Knowledge: Mastering the Art of Problem Solving (2001)
Every sound perceived by the acute ear in the rhythm of the world about us can be represented musically. 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 love music passionately. And because l love it, I try to free it from barren traditions that stifle it.
An Encyclopedia of Quotations About Music (1981)
I confess that I am no longer thinking in musical terms, or at least not much, even though I believe with all my heart that Music remains for all time the finest means of expression we have.
Letter to Paul Dukas (1901)
Collect impressions. Don’t be in a hurry to write them down. Because that’s something music can do better than painting: it can centralise variations of colour and light within a single picture — a truth generally ignored, obvious as it is.
Debussy in a letter to his pupil Raoul Bardac (1906)
I believe the principle fault of the majority of writers and artists is having neither the will nor the courage to break with their successes, failing to seek new paths and give birth to new ideas.
What I am trying to do is something different — an effect of reality, but what some fools call Impressionism, a term that is usually misapplied, especially by the critics who don't hesitate to apply it to Turner, the greatest creator of mysterious effects in the whole world of art.
The Lives of the Great Composers (1997)
Composers aren't daring enough. They're afraid of that sacred idol called "common sense", which is the most dreadful thing I know — after all, it's no more than a religion founded to excuse the ubiquity of imbeciles!
Search for a discipline within freedom! Don't let yourelf be governed by formulae drawn from decadent philosophies: they are for the feeble-minded. Listen to no one's advice except that of the wind in the trees. That can recount the whole history of mankind...