Isadora Duncan Quotes

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

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

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

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

Many women to whom I have preached the doctrine of freedom have weakly replied, 'But who is to support the children?' It seems to me that if the marriage ceremony is needed as a protection to insure the enforced support of children, then you are marrying a man who, you suspect, would under certain conditions, refuse to support his children, and it is a pretty low-down proposition. For you are marrying a man whom you already suspect of being a villain. But I have not so poor an opinion of men that I believe the greater percentage of them to be such low specimens of humanity.

My motto - sans limites.

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

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

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 the satisfaction of getting my own way.

Don't let them tame you.

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.

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?

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.

With what price we pay for the glory of motherhood.

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 the soul will have become the movement of the body

I had learned to have a perfect nausea for the theatre: the continual repetition of the same words and the same gestures, night after night, and the caprices, the way of looking at life, and the entire rigmarole disgusted me.

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.

Farewell my friends, I go to glory.

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.

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

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

It is unheard-of, uncivilized barbarism that any woman should still be forced to bear such monstrous torture. It should be remedied. It should be stopped. It is simply absurd that, with our modern science, painless childbirth does not exist as a matter of course ... I tremble with indignation when I think ofthe unspeakable egotism and blindness of men of science who permit such atrocities when they can be remedied.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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 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.

I bring you the dance. I bring you the idea that is going to revolutionise our entire epoch. Where have I discovered it? By the Pacific Ocean, but the waving pine-forests of Sierra Nevada. I have seen the ideal figure of youthful American dancing over the top of the Rockies. The supreme poet of our country is Walt Whitman. I have discovered the dance that is worthy of the poem of Walt Whitman. I am indeed the spiritual daughter of Walt Whitman. For the children of America I will create a new dance that will express America. I bring to your theatre the vital soul that it lacks, the soul of the dancer. For you know...that the birth of the theatre was the dance, that the first actor was the dancer. He danced and sang. That was the birth of the tragedy, and until the dancer in all his spontaneous great art returns to the theatre, your theatre will not live in its true expression!

When I was sixteen, I danced before an audience without music. At the end someone suddenly cried 'its Death and the Maiden'. But that was not my intention; I was only endeavoring to express my first knowledge of the underlying tragedy in all seemingly joyous manifestation. The dance according with my comprehension, should have been called 'Life and the Maiden'.

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

My first idea of movement, of the dance, certainly came from the rhythm of the wave.

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.

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

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

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.

Movements are as eloquent as words.

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

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.

I had discovered that love might be a pastime as well as a tragedy, and I gave myself to it with pagan innocence.