Isadora Duncan Quotes - Page 2

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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?

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

Memories are less tangible than dreams.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.