Isadora Duncan
What one has not experienced, one will never understand in print.Collection: Experience
With what price we pay for the glory of motherhood.Collection: Mothers
Any intelligent woman who reads the marriage contract, and then goes into it, deserves all the consequences.Collection: Marriage
You were once wild here. Don't let them tame you.
My motto - sans limites.
The dancer's body is simply the luminous manifestation of the soul.
So long as little children are allowed to suffer, there is no true love in this world.
It seems to me monstrous that anyone should believe that the jazz rhythm expresses America. Jazz rhythm expresses the primitive savage.
The finest inheritance you can give to a child is to allow it to make its own way, completely on its own feet.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 first essential in writing about anything is that the writer should have no experience of the matter.
People don't live nowadays: they get about ten percent out of life.
Perhaps he was a bit different from other people, but what really sympathetic person is not a little mad?
So that ends my first experience of matrimony, which I always thought a highly over-rated performance.
Dance is the movement of the universe concentrated in an individual.Collection: Dance
If I could tell you what it meant, there would be no point in dancing itCollection: Music
To awaken human emotion is the highest level of art.Collection: Art
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.Collection: Prayer
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.Collection: Dance
Anybody can and should dance... It's good for the body and the spirit.Collection: Body
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.Collection: Inspirational
Dancing: The Highest Intelligence in the Freest Body.Collection: Dance
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.Collection: Beach
Movements are as eloquent as words.Collection: Gymnastics
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.Collection: Dance
The Dance - it is the rhythm of all that dies in order to live again; it is the eternal rising of the sun.Collection: Dance
If I could say it, I would not have to dance it.Collection: If I Could
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.Collection: Dance
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.Collection: Dance
I do not teach children, I give them joy.Collection: Children
I am seeking that dance which might be the divine expression of the human spirit through the medium of the body's movement.Collection: Dance
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.Collection: Ocean
I preach freedom of the mind through freedom of the body; women, for example - out of the prison of corsets.Collection: Mind
What I am interested in doing is finding and expressing a new form of lifeCollection: Form
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.Collection: Tired
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 merchandiseCollection: Religious
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.Collection: Art
The only dance masters I could have were Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Walt Whitman and Nietzsche.Collection: Dance
No composer has yet caught this rhythm of America - it is too mighty for the ears of most.Collection: Music
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.Collection: Dance
Farewell my friends, I go to glory.Collection: Farewell
It is the mission of all art to express the highest and most beautiful ideals of man.Collection: Beautiful
America knows nothing of food, love, or art.Collection: Sarcastic
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.'Collection: Mother
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.Collection: Dance
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.Collection: One Direction