Claude Debussy Quote

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.


Quoted in An Encyclopedia of Quotations About Music (1981) by Nat Shapiro, p. 268 Unsourced variant: There is no theory. You have only to listen. Fantasy is the law.


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...

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...

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...

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...