Top 40 Claude Debussy Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Music is the silence between the notes.”

— Claude Debussy

Featured in: Music Quotes

2. “Works of art make rules; rules do not make works of art.”

— Claude Debussy

3. “Listen to no one's advice except that of the wind in the trees. That can recount the whole history of mankind.”

— Claude Debussy

4. “Art is the most beautiful of all lies.”

— Claude Debussy

5. “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

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

— Claude Debussy

7. “Music is the arithmetic of sounds as optics is the geometry of light.”

— Claude Debussy

8. “There is nothing more musical than a sunset.”

— Claude Debussy

9. “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.”

— Claude Debussy

10. “Anyone who calls my music “impressionist” is an imbecile.”

— Claude Debussy

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

— Claude Debussy

12. “Music begins where words are powerless to express. Music is made for the inexpressible. I want music to seem to rise from the shadows and indeed sometimes to return to them.”

— Claude Debussy

13. “There is no theory. You merely have to listen. Pleasure is the law.”

— Claude Debussy

14. “A beautiful sunset that was mistaken for a dawn.”

— Claude Debussy

15. “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

16. “To complete a work is just like being present at the death of someone you love.”

— Claude Debussy

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

— Claude Debussy

18. “On those who overanalyze his music: When you tear the wings off a butterfly, it is no longer a butterfly.”

— Claude Debussy

19. “People come to music to seek oblivion: is that not also a form of deception?”

— Claude Debussy

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

— Claude Debussy

21. “Beauty seems to strike some people as a personal affront.”

— Claude Debussy

22. “Do not allow the accents in the brass to produce space between the notes.”

— Claude Debussy

23. “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.”

— Claude Debussy

24. “In opera, there is always too much singing.”

— Claude Debussy

25. “It is necessary to abandon yourself completely, and let the music do as it will with you. All people come to music to seek oblivion.”

— Claude Debussy

26. “Extreme complication is contrary to art.”

— Claude Debussy

27. “He was the incomparable painter of mystery, silence, and the infinite, of the passing cloud, and the sunlit shimmer of the waves-subleties which none before him had been capable of suggesting.”

— Claude Debussy

28. “If I am not making music, I have no reason for existing.”

— Claude Debussy

29. “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

30. “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.”

— Claude Debussy

31. “I am more and more convinced that music is not, in essence, a thing which can be cast into a traditional and fixed form. It is made up of colors and rhythms.”

— Claude Debussy

32. “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.”

— Claude Debussy

33. “The music I desire must be supple enough to adapt itself to the lyrical effusions of the soul and the fantasy of dreams.”

— Claude Debussy

34. “The worship of Adonis is united with that of Christ .”

— Claude Debussy

35. “Is it not our duty to find the symphonic formula which fits our time, one which progress, daring and modern victory demand? The century of airplanes has a right to its own music.”

— Claude Debussy

36. “Claude Debussy was a rare phenomenon a composer profoundly and subversively revolutionary...”

— Claude Debussy

37. “The age of automobiles and aeroplanes cannot express itself in the same manner as did the age of the diligence.”

— Claude Debussy

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

— Claude Debussy

39. “The century of aeroplanes deserves its own music. As there are no precedents, I must create anew.”

— Claude Debussy

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

— Claude Debussy

41. “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

42. “People don’t very much like things that are beautiful. They are so far from their nasty little minds.”

— Claude Debussy

43. “Proust is long-winded, precious, and a bit of an old woman.”

— Claude Debussy

44. “Art is of absolutely no use to the masses.”

— Claude Debussy