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

Claude Debussy

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Claude Debussy
Age: 55 †
Born: 1862
Born: August 22
Died: 1918
Died: March 25
Composer
Music Critic
Musician
Pianist
St. Germain-en-Laye
Claud Debussy
Debussy
Claude Achille Debussy
Achille Claude Debussy
C. Debussy
Claude-Achille Debussy
Achille-Claude
Achille-Claude Debussy
Beauty
Sound
Art
Light
Optics
Music
Arithmetic
Geometry
Aesthetic
Sounds

More quotes by Claude Debussy

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Anyone who calls my music impressionist is an imbecile.
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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!
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The trouble with the opera is there's always to much singing.
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Life is the space between our things.
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Art is the most beautiful deception of all!
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People come to music to seek oblivion: is that not also a form of deception?
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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
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Music is the expression of the movement of the waters, the play of curves described by changing breezes.
Claude Debussy
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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.
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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.
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The worship of Adonis is united with that of Christ.
Claude Debussy
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Do not allow the accents in the brass to produce space between the notes.
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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
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Claude Debussy was a rare phenomenon a composer profoundly and subversively revolutionary.
Claude Debussy
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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
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Music is in the space between the notes.
Claude Debussy
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I love music passionately. And because I love it I try to free it from barren traditions that stifle it.
Claude Debussy
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If we look at the works of JS Bach ... on each page we discover things which we thought were born only yesterday, from delightful arabesques to an overflowing of religious feeling greater than anything we have since discovered.
Claude Debussy
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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
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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