Isadora Duncan Quotes

To awaken human emotion is the highest level of art.

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

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

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

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.

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

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 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.

Dancing: The Highest Intelligence in the Freest Body.

Movements are as eloquent as words.

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.

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

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.

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

My motto - sans limites.

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.

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

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 do not teach children, I give them joy.

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.

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

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

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.

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