“Please remember, monsieur, that the triangle is not a sentimental instrument.” 

Claude Debussy, 1909

“Where am I?”  

“Very far from your tottering globe, which you will never see again, very far from your sad sun, which is dying slowly in the bosom of its cold planets. Your worlds have fallen into the gaping depths of the immensity, and you would search in vain for Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn and Uranus. All those children of darkness have returned to eternal oblivion.”

Jane de La Vaudère, 1893

 

“She seemed to be undulating in the caresses of the nocturnal star, a jealous watcher.”

Édouard Schuré, 1897

“Verlaine, Mallarmé, Laforgue brought us new tones, new sounds. They cast glimmers on the words that had not yet been seen; they used methods unknown to the poets their predecessors; they conceived the verses or the prose like musicians and, like musicians again, combined the images and their sound correspondence.”

 Paul Dukas, 1921

“O solemn procession of magnificent suns

Knot and unknot your great, golden masses,

Gently, sadly, to somber music

Conduct your sleeping sister's slow cortege.”

Jules Laforgue, 1890

“It’s devoutly to be wished that this ardor for finding ways of bringing art before the public should be cooled, otherwise there will soon be more fake artists than real art—and I’m not even certain this moment hasn’t already arrived.”

Claude Debussy, 1891

“Perfect and unpredictable beings will offer themselves for your experiments.”

Arthur Rimbaud, 1875

“For this science, said the masses, nothing is impossible: she commands the elements, knows the language of the celestial bodies, and directs the progress of the stars; the dead rise in their tombs and articulate with fatal words the wind of the night that whistles in their skulls.”

Éliphas Lévi, 1856

“The poet will be a poet only if he is by nature initiated into the analogies which make up the universe: Symbolism is a mystical doctrine.”

Louis Laloy, 1905

 

“Every work of art should come to a point or summit, like a pyramid, or else the light should strike one spot on a sphere.” 

Gustav Flaubert, 1857

“Debussy once asked me rather naively if I consorted with the composers of my own country; and without waiting for an answer told me that he did not consort with the composers of France.”

Cyril Scott, 1933

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“Never shall I forget the impression made upon me by Debussy's thick-set figure, the huge greenish, almost Moorish face beneath the dense thicket of black hair, and the obscure dreaming eyes that seemed to be peering through me at some object behind my back. As he lumbered vaguely forward, extending a cushioned hand, he looked like some Triton arisen from ‘the glaucous caverns of Old Ocean. ‘A mythological survival!’ I said to myself.”  

Arnold Bax, 1921

 

“We live in a very strange era, in which we want to say everything, know everything, publish everything. When will there be respect for us and for our mystery?”

Claude Debussy, 1912

 

“What artist could not be tempted by the piquant enigma of a human being who became a flower?”

Jean Lorrain, 1909

“Would not one suppose that the curved line and the spiral pay their court to the straight line, and twine about it in a mute adoration? Would not one say that all these delicate corollæ, all these calices, explosions of odours and colours, execute a mystical dance around the hieratic staff?”

Charles Baudelaire, 1869

“So, Monsieur, it’s toward the zone of the sirens that we’re steering?”

Maurice Renard, 1933

“Look at that flower. It hides a marvelous secret in its calyx. The perfume that evaporates from it does not diminish by its intensity the mystery enclosed in its heart. Here, it is the symbol of joy.”

Victor-Émile Michelet, 1900

 

“The Germans! Ouf! Everything with them is en gros. A theme must be long, regardless of its contents or value; the longer the better. Then another interminable episode and then another endless theme. Then, after sixteen quarts of beer, they begin a development so long, so long, that there is scarcely room in this house to hold it. Take, for instance, the symphonies of Mahler with its thousand voices and whips, submarines and whatnot. Or Monsieur Strauss, who is clever in that he knows how to write nothingness itself.” 

Claude Debussy, 1913

 

“The dark stranger now began to speak of the true craft of song in very extraordinary language, which itself almost sounded like strange songs hitherto unheard.” 

E.T.A. Hoffmann, 1819

 

“Any sounds in any combination and in any succession are henceforth free to be used in a musical continuity."

Claude Debussy, 1893