Claude Debussy Quotes

The beautiful is in nature, and it is encountered under the most diverse forms of reality. Once it is found it belongs to art, or rather to the artist who discovers it.

Color is the keyboard, the eyes are the harmonies, the soul is the piano with many strings. The artist is the hand that plays, touching one key or another, to cause vibrations in the soul.

A theologian who does not love art, poetry, music and nature can be dangerous. Blindness and deafness toward the beautiful are not incidental; they necessarily are reflected in his theology.

I'm inspired by nature. Other artist's work is important for developing my perception.

No – we have been as usual asking the wrong question. It does not matter a hoot what the mockingbird on the chimney is singing. The real and proper question is: Why is it beautiful?

Grant that the true organ with which the beautiful is apprehended is the imagination, and it follows that all arts are likely to affect the feelings indirectly.

There's something always instinctively visually right about nature. There's no difference, to my eye, between looking at a great painting and looking at nature. Because painting, when it's great, has the same immutable rightness, unquestioned rightness, about it.

To the artist there is never anything ugly in nature.

That pleasure which is at once the most pure, the most elevating and the most intense, is derived, I maintain, from the contemplation of the beautiful.

It is not sufficient to see and to know the beauty of a work. We must feel and be affected by it.

Great works of music speak to us from another realm even though they speak to us in ordinary physical sounds.

To strong, susceptible characters, the music of nature is not confined to sweet sounds.

I feel like I can see the music and can see how the character of the music actually flows. For me, that's music to my eyes.

People would always ask me how I came up with my music and what it felt like to make music, and I would always see colours, and then I found out that that was synaesthesia. It helps me understand songs and what I like.

I get inspired by the sounds that evoke an emotion from me. That's what I am drawn to; that's what turns me on.

Aesthetic experiences are powerful, to be sure, and probably inescapable, but Nature will not remain effective for very long.

The work of art itself is . . . a vibrant, magical, and exemplary object which returns us to the world in some way more open and enriched.

Beauty is a primeval phenomenon, which itself never makes its appearance, but the reflection of which is visible in a thousand different utterances of the creative mind, and is as various as nature herself.

High horns, low horns, silence, and finally a pandemonium of trumpets, rattles, croaks, and cries that almost shakes the bog with its nearness ... A new day has begun on the crane marsh. A sense of time lies thick and heavy on such a place ... Our ability to perceive quality in nature begins, as in art, with the pretty. It expands through successive stages of the beautiful to values as yet uncaptured by language.

For his part, every beauty of art or nature made him thankful as well as happy, and that the pleasure to be had in listening to fine music, as in looking at the stars in the sky, or at a beautiful landscape or picture, was a benefit for which we might thank Heaven as sincerely as for any other worldly blessing.

It does no harm to the romance of the sunset to know a little bit about it.

The sight of anything extremely beautiful, in nature or in art, brings back the memory of what one loves, with the speed of lightning.

At twilight, nature is not without loveliness, though perhaps its chief use is to illustrate quotations from the poets.

Without painting, sculpture, music, poetry, and the emotions produced by natural beauty of every kind, life would lose half its charm.

Our ability to perceive quality in nature begins, as in art, with the pretty. It expands through successive stages of the beautiful to values as yet uncaptured by language.