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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!

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
Enough
Excuse
Imbeciles
Thing
Sacred
Composers
Aren
Dreadful
Afraid
Idol
Called
Founded
Common
Idols
Religion
Daring
Sense
Composer
Ubiquity

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People come to music to seek oblivion: is that not also a form of deception?
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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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The worship of Adonis is united with that of Christ.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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The century of airplanes has a right to its own music.
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I love music passionately. And because I love it I try to free it from barren traditions that stifle it.
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Do not allow the accents in the brass to produce space between the notes.
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Life is the space between our things.
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The colour of my soul is iron-grey and sad bats wheel about the steeple of my dreams.
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First of all, ladies and gentlemen, you must forget that you are singers.
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Listen to no one's advice except that of the wind in the trees. That can recount the whole history of mankind.
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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.
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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. It is a free art gushing forth, an open-air art boundless as the elements, the wind, the sky, the sea. It must never be shut in and become an academic art.
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To complete a work is just like being present at the death of someone you love.
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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 may happen.
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How much has to be explored and discarded before reaching the naked flesh of feeling.
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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.
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Inspiration and ideas only come to me when I have not had a woman in a very long time... Ballads, polonaises, even a whole concerto may have been lost forever up your des durka, I can't tell you how many. I have been so deeply engulfed in my love for you I have hardly created anything.
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