Isadora Duncan Quotes - Page 3

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

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

So long as little children are allowed to suffer, there is no true love in this world.

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.

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

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

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.

Farewell my friends, I go to glory.

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

America knows nothing of food, love, or art.

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.'

The first essential in writing about anything is that the writer should have no experience of the matter.

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

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.

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.

With what price we pay for the glory of motherhood.

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.

Any woman or man who would write the truth of their lives would write a great work. But no one has dared to write the truth of their lives.

It is only in romances that people undergo a sudden metamorphosis. In real life, even after the most terrible experiences, the main character remains exactly the same.

It seems to me monstrous that anyone should believe that the jazz rhythm expresses America. Jazz rhythm expresses the primitive savage.

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

Will and energy sometimes prove greater than either genius or talent or temperament.

I have only danced my life. As a child I danced the spontaneous joy of growing things. As an adolescent, I danced with joy turning to apprehension of the first realisation of tragic undercurrents; apprehension of the pitiless brutality and crushing progress of life.

To express what is the most moral, healthful and beautiful in art this is the mission of the dancer, and to this I dedicate my life.