Isadora Duncan

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

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.

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.

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

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Dancing: The Highest Intelligence in the Freest Body.

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

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.

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.

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.'

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.

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

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

To awaken human emotion is the highest level of art.

Eleonora Duse said, "Tell me about Deirdre and Patrick," and made me repeat to her all their little sayings and ways, and show her their photos, which she kissed and cried over. She never said "Cease to grieve", but she grieved with me, and, for the first time since their death, I felt I was not alone.

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