71 Quotes by Claude Debussy

the colour of my soul is iron-grey and sad bats wheel about the steeple of my dreams.

I have a horror of sentimentality, and I cannot forget that its name is Saint-Saëns.

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.

When Claude Debussy studied at the Paris Conservatory from age ten to age twenty-two, many considered him a rebel because of his treatment of dissonance and his disdain for the established forms. He reputedly turned to a fellow student during a performance of Beethoven with the words, "Let's go. He's starting to develop.

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!

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

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

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

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.