Claude Debussy

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.

Extreme complication is contrary to art.

Works of art make rules rules do not make works of art.

Art is the most beautiful of all lies.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

Music is the silence between the notes.