Martha Graham
I want to make people feel intensely alive. I'd rather have them against me than indifferent.Collection: People
There is fatigue so great that the body cries, even in its sleep.Collection: Dance
I've relaxed my feelings about other companies performing my works. I have never in principle been against my ballets being danced by other companies. Rather, it is that we lack the time, space and money to insure that they are done well. To me, the only sin is mediocrity.Collection: Dance
What I do must be done in the sunlight of awareness.Collection: Done
The past is not dead; it is not even past. People live on inner time; the moment in which a decisive thought or feeling takes place can be at any time. Timeless feelings are common to all of us.Collection: Time
I did not choose to be a dancer. I was chosen.Collection: Dance
Discipline is liberation.Collection: Discipline
You have no right to go before a public without an adequate technique, just because you feel. Anything feels - a leaf feels, a storm feels - what right have you to do that? You have to have speech, and it's a cultivated speech.Collection: Storm
The world I'm interested in is the one where things are not named.Collection: Dance
...Although, as the Latin verb to educate, educate, indicates, it is not a question of putting something in but drawing it out, if it is there to begin with...I want all of my students and all of my dancers to be aware of the poignancy of life at that moment. I would like to feel that I had, in some way, given them the gift of themselves.Collection: Latin
It is not your business to determine how good it is, nor how valuable it is, nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open.Collection: Expression
My dancing is not an attempt to interpret life in the literary sense. It is an affirmation of life through movement.Collection: Dance
I feel that the essence of dance is the expression of man--the landscape of his soul. I hope that every dance I do reveals something of myself or some wonderful thing a human can be.Collection: Men
Stand up! Keep your backs straight! Remember that this is where the wings grow.Collection: Dance
There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all of time, this expression is unique.Collection: Unique
The secret to dancing is that it is about everything except dancing.Collection: Dancing
The spine is the tree of life. Respect it.Collection: Dance
It takes about ten years to make a mature dancer. The training is twofold. There is the study and practice of the craft in order to strengthen the muscular structure of the body. The body is shaped, disciplined, honored, and in time, trusted. The movement become clean, precise, eloquent, truthful. Movement never lies. It is a barometer telling the state of the soul's weather to all who can read it. This might be called the law of the dancer's life, the law which governs its outer aspectsCollection: Lying
You will only get out of a dance class what you bring to it. Learn by practice.Collection: Inspirational
When you start with an idea, or something hits you, then you have to follow that through to the end, and it's the following through to the end that makes the pattern. That, for me, is choreography.Collection: Ideas
There is a force, a quickness that is translated through you into action. If you block it, the world will not have it.Collection: Block
I am certain that movement never lies. There is only one law of posture I have been able to discover - the perpendicular line connecting heaven and earth.Collection: Dance
Dancing appears glamorous, easy, delightful. But the path to paradise of the achievement is not easier than any other. There is fatigue so great that the body cries, even in its sleep. There are times of complete frustration, there are daily small deaths.Collection: Dance
Dance is a song of the body. Either of joy or pain.Collection: Motivational
People have asked me why I chose to be a dancer. I did not choose. I was chosen to be a dancer, and with that, you live all your life.Collection: People
If I can't dance, I don't care if my dances are ever done again!Collection: Dance
Repetition not for monotony but the ecstasy it induces.Collection: Repetition
You don't pick dance. Dance picks you.Collection: Picks
I believe one thing: that today is yesterday and tomorrow is today and you can't stop.Collection: Believe
Nobody cares if you can’t dance well. Just get up and dance. Great dancers are great because of their passion.Collection: Dance
It’s what I always wanted to do, to show the laughter, the fun, the joy of dance.Collection: Fun
I never thought of myself as being a genius. I don’t know what genius is. I think a far better expression is a retriever, a lovely strong golden retriever that brings things back from the past, or retrieves things from our common blood memory.Collection: Strong