“Art is the most beautiful deception of all!”

— Claude Debussy

Unsourced variant: Art is the most beautiful of all lies.
The Life of the Creative Spirit
Context: 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. … Let us not disillusion anyone by bringing too much reality into the dream.

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "Art is the most beautiful deception of all!" by Claude Debussy?

Claude Debussy photo

Claude Debussy 34

French composer 1862–1918

Related quotes

“The art of pleasing is the art of deception.”

Luc de Clapiers, Marquis de Vauvenargues (1715–1747) French writer, a moralist

Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

“The essence of all beautiful art, all great art, is gratitude.”

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) German philosopher, poet, composer, cultural critic, and classical philologist

“Art is limitation…. The most beautiful part of every picture is the frame.”

G. K. Chesterton book Tremendous Trifles

Tremendous Trifles (1909)

“Concerts are never real music, you have to give up the idea of hearing in them all the most beautiful things of art.”

Frédéric Chopin (1810–1849) Polish composer

Said to one of his students, according to "Chopin: Pianist and Teacher: As Seen by His Pupils" by Jean-Jacques Eigeldinger

“Sometimes terror and pain are not the best levers; deception, when it works, is the most elegant and least expensive manipulation of all.”

Vernor Vinge A Fire Upon the Deep (1st edition)

Source: A Fire Upon the Deep (1992), Chapter 14 (p. 145).

“Dancing is the loftiest, the most moving, the most beautiful of the arts, because it is no mere translation or abstraction from life; it is life itself.”

H. Havelock Ellis (1859–1939) British physician, writer, and social reformer

Source: The Dance of Life http://www.gutenberg.net.au/ebooks03/0300671.txt (1923), Ch. 2

“Most reckless things are beautiful in some way, and recklessness is what makes experimental art beautiful, just as religions are beautiful because of the strong possibilities that they are founded on nothing.”

John Ashbery (1927–2017) poet from the United States

“The most perfectly constructed object in nature, and also the most beautiful object in nature, is the human form as it approaches perfection. This, then, is the criterion of construction as it is of design. The study of its beauties is the veritable key to art…”

Ernest Flagg (1857–1947) American architect

Small Houses: Their Economic Design and Construction (1922)

“I think having land and not ruining it is the most beautiful art that anybody could ever want.”

Andy Warhol (1928–1987) American artist

“Life is the art of being well-deceived; and in order that the deception may succeed it must be habitual and uninterrupted.”

William Hazlitt book The Round Table

Source: The Round Table

Related topics