Isadora Duncan Quotes

I see only the ideal. But no ideals have ever been fully successful on this earth.

Memories are less tangible than dreams.

The only dance masters I could have were Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Walt Whitman and Nietzsche.

Perhaps he was a bit different from other people, but what really sympathetic person is not a little mad?

Man must speak, then sing, then dance. The speaking is the brain, the thinking man. The singing is the emotion. The dancing is the Dionysian ecstasy which carries away all.

I am seeking that dance which might be the divine expression of the human spirit through the medium of the body's movement.

The Dance of the Future will have to become again a high religious art as it was with the Greeks. For art which is not religious is not art, it is mere merchandise

The real American type can never be a ballet dancer. The legs are too long, the body too supple and the spirit too free for this school of affected grace and toe walking.

If I could explain, I wouldn't need to dance!

Others loved themselves, money, theories, power: Lenin loved his fellow men.... Lenin was God, as Christ was God, because God is Love and Christ and Lenin were all Love!

The finest inheritance you can give to a child is to allow it to make its own way, completely on its own feet.

The dancer's body is simply the luminous manifestation of her soul...This is the truly creative dancer, natural but not imitative, speaking in movement out of herself and out of something greater than all selves.

The butcher with his bloody apron incites bloodshed, murder. Why not? From cutting the throat of a young calf to cutting the throats of our brothers and sisters is but a step. While we ourselves are living graves of murdered animals, how can we expect any ideal conditions on the earth?

If I could say it, I would not have to dance it.

The wind? I am the wind. The sea and the moon? I am the sea and the moon. Tears, pain, love, bird-flights? I am all of them. I dance what I am. Sin, prayer, flight, the light that never was on land or sea? I dance what I am.

Farewell my friends, I go to glory.

I wonder how many parents realize that by the so-called education they are giving their children, they are only driving them into the commonplace, and depriving them of any chance of doing anything beautiful or original.

I had discovered that love might be a pastime as well as a tragedy, and I gave myself to it with pagan innocence.

Movements are as eloquent as words.

The dancer of the future will be one whose body & soul have grown so harmoniously together that the natural language of the soul will have become the movement of the body.

No composer has yet caught this rhythm of America - it is too mighty for the ears of most.

The noblest art is the nude. This truth is recognized by all, and followed by painters, sculptors and poets. Only the dancer has forgotten it, who should remember it, as the instrument of [the dance] art is the human body itself.

I had learned to have a perfect nausea for the theatre: the continual repetition of the same words and the same gestures, night after night, and the caprices, the way of looking at life, and the entire rigmarole disgusted me.

The dancer's body is simply the luminous manifestation of the soul.

All my lovers have been geniuses; it's the one thing that I insist.

Dancing: The Highest Intelligence in the Freest Body.

So that ends my first experience of matrimony, which I always thought a highly over-rated performance.

Master technique, so that technique NEVER prevents you from dancing.

One might say that the American trend of education is to reduce the senses almost to nil.

Any intelligent woman who reads the marriage contract, and then goes into it, deserves all the consequences.

We may not all break the Ten Commandments, but we are certainly all capable of it. Within us lurks the breaker of all laws, ready to spring out at the first real opportunity.

The movement of the waves, of winds, of the earth is ever in the same lasting harmony. We do not stand on the beach and inquire of the ocean what was its movement of the past and what will be its movement of the future. We realize that the movement peculiar to its nature is eternal to its nature. The dancer of the future will be one whose body and soul have grown so harmoniously together that the natural language of that soul will have become the movement of the body.

To awaken human emotion is the highest level of art.

Virtuous people are simply those who have not been tempted sufficiently, because they live in a vegetative state, or because their purposes are so concentrated in one direction that they have not had the leisure to glance around them.

It is the mission of all art to express the highest and most beautiful ideals of man.

I would rather live in Russia on black bread and vodka than in the United States at the best hotels. America knows nothing of food, love or art.

With what price we pay for the glory of motherhood.

There are likewise three kinds of dancers: first, those who consider dancing as a sort of gymnastic drill, made up of impersonal and graceful arabesques; second, those who, by concentrating their minds, lead the body into the rhythm of a desired emotion, expressing a remembered feeling or experience. And finally, there are those who convert the body into a luminous fluidity, surrendering it to the inspiration of the soul.

The Dance - it is the rhythm of all that dies in order to live again; it is the eternal rising of the sun.

The dancer's body is simply the luminous manifestation of the soul. The true dance is an expression of serenity; it is controlled by the profound rhythm of inner emotion. Emotion does not reach the moment of frenzy out of a spurt of action; it broods first, it sleeps like the life in the seed, and it unfolds with a gentle slowness. The Greeks understood the continuing beauty of a movement that mounted, that spread, that ended with a promise of rebirth.