Isadora Duncan Quotes

So long as little children are allowed to suffer, there is no true love in this world.

What I am interested in doing is finding and expressing a new form of life

I was born by the sea, and I have noticed that all the great events of my life have taken place by the sea. My first idea of movement, of the dance, certainly came from the rhythm of the waves.

I have discovered the dance. I have discovered the art which has been lost for two thousand years

All my life I have struggled to make one authentic gesture.

I preach freedom of the mind through freedom of the body; women, for example - out of the prison of corsets.

It is unheard-of, uncivilized barbarism that any woman should still be forced to bear such monstrous torture. It should be remedied. It should be stopped. It is simply absurd that, with our modern science, painless childbirth does not exist as a matter of course.... I tremble with indignation when I think ofthe unspeakable egotism and blindness of men of science who permit such atrocities when they can be remedied.

Dance is the movement of the universe concentrated in an individual.

These people seemed so enwrapped in snobbishness and the glory of being rich that they had no art sense whatever.

Now I am going to reveal to you something which is very pure, a totally white thought. It is always in my heart; it blooms at each of my steps... The Dance is love, it is only love, it alone, and that is enough... I, then, it is amorously that I dance: to poems, to music but now I would like to no longer dance to anything but the rhythm of my soul.

The first essential in writing about anything is that the writer should have no experience of the matter.

Before I was born my mother was in great agony of spirit and in a tragic situation. She could take no food except iced oysters and champagne. If people ask me when I began to dance, I reply 'In my mother's womb, probably as a result of the oysters and Champagne.'

Art is not necessary at all. All that is necessary to make this world a better place to live in is to love - to love as Christ loved, as Buddha loved.

For I was never able to understand, then or later on, why, if one wanted to do a thing, one should not do it. For I have never waited to do as I wished. This has frequently brought me to disaster and calamity, but at least I have had the the satisfaction of getting my own way.

There are joys so complete, so all perfect, that one should not survive them.

I do not teach children, I give them joy.

My motto - sans limites.

The artist is the only lover; he alone has the pure vision of beauty, and love is the vision of the soul when it is permitted to gaze upon immortal beauty.

People don't live nowadays: they get about ten percent out of life.

My first idea of movement, of the dance, certainly came from the rhythm of the wave.

It has taken me years of struggle, hard work and research to learn to make one simple gesture, and I know enough about the art of writing to realize that it would take as many years of concentrated effort to write one simple, beautiful sentence.

A dancer, if she is great, can give to the people something that they can carry with them forever. They can never forget it, and it has changed them, though they may never know it.

Anybody can and should dance... It's good for the body and the spirit.

Will and energy sometimes prove greater than either genius or talent or temperament.

I finally discovered the source of all movement, the unity from which all diversities of movement are born.

I have only danced my life. As a child I danced the spontaneous joy of growing things. As an adolescent, I danced with joy turning to apprehension of the first realisation of tragic undercurrents; apprehension of the pitiless brutality and crushing progress of life.

To dance is to live. What I want is a school of life.

Oh Woman, come before us, before our eyes longing for beauty, and tired of the ugliness of civilization, come in simple tunics, letting us see the line and harmony of the body beneath, and dance for us. Dance us the sweetness of life. Give us again the sweetness and the beauty of the true dance, give us again the joy of seeing the simple unconscious pure body of a woman. Like a great call it has come, and women must hear it and answer it.

Eleonora Duse said, "Tell me about Deirdre and Patrick," and made me repeat to her all their little sayings and ways, and show her their photos, which she kissed and cried over. She never said "Cease to grieve", but she grieved with me, and, for the first time since their death, I felt I was not alone.

The dancer will not belong to a nation but to all humanity.

Let us first teach little children to breathe, to vibrate, to feel, and to become one with the general harmony and movement of nature. Let us first produce a beautiful human being, a dancing child.

The whole world is absolutely brought up on lies. We are fed nothing but lies. It begins with lies and half our lives we live with lies.

It seems to me monstrous that anyone should believe that the jazz rhythm expresses America. Jazz rhythm expresses the primitive savage.

Most human beings today waste some 25 to 30 years of their lives before they break through the actual and conventional lies which surround them.

What one has not experienced, one will never understand in print.

I intend to work for this dance of the future. I do not know whether I have the necessary qualities; I may have neither genius nor talent nor temperament. But I know that I have a Will; and will and energy sometimes prove greater than either genius or talent or temperament.

Many women to whom I have preached the doctrine of freedom have weakly replied, 'But who is to support the children?' It seems to me that if the marriage ceremony is needed as a protection to insure the enforced support of children, then you are marrying a man who, you suspect, would under certain conditions, refuse to support his children, and it is a pretty low-down proposition. For you are marrying a man whom you already suspect of being a villain. But I have not so poor an opinion of men that I believe the greater percentage of them to be such low specimens of humanity.

I hope that schools have changed since I was a little girl. My memory of the teaching of the public schools is that it showed the brutal incomprehension of children.

To express what is the most moral, healthful and beautiful in art this is the mission of the dancer, and to this I dedicate my life.

If I could tell you what it meant, there would be no point in dancing it

Any woman or man who would write the truth of their lives would write a great work. But no one has dared to write the truth of their lives.

It is only in romances that people undergo a sudden metamorphosis. In real life, even after the most terrible experiences, the main character remains exactly the same.

If we seek the real source of the dance, if we go to nature, we find that the dance of the future is the dance of the past, the dance of eternity, and has been and always will be the same... The movement of waves, of winds, of the earth is ever the same lasting harmony.

My art is just an effort to express the truth of my being in gesture and movement. It has taken me long years to find even one absolutely true movement.

You were once wild here. Don't let them tame you.

America knows nothing of food, love, or art.

No flower of art ever fully blossomed save it was nourished by tears of agony.

When I was sixteen, I danced before an audience without music. At the end someone suddenly cried 'its Death and the Maiden'. But that was not my intention; I was only endeavoring to express my first knowledge of the underlying tragedy in all seemingly joyous manifestation. The dance according with my comprehension, should have been called 'Life and the Maiden'.