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Quotes by Isadora
Duncan
”To dance is to live.
What I want is a school of life.”
- Isadora Duncan
”The Dance
–
it is the rhythm of all that dies in
order to live again;
it is the eternal rising
of the sun.”
- Isadora
Duncan
”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.”
- Isadora Duncan
”No, I can't explain the
dance to
you;
if I could tell you what it
meant,
there would be no point
in dancing it.”
- Isadora
Duncan
”Dancing: the highest intelligence in
the freest body.”
- Isadora
Duncan
”It is the mission of
all art
to express the highest
and most beautiful ideals of man.”
- Isadora
Duncan
”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.”
- Isadora
Duncan
“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.”
- Isadora
Duncan
”Every movement that can
be danced on the
seashore
without being in harmony with the rhythm
of the waves,
every movement that can be danced in the
forest
without being in harmony with the
swaying of the branches,
every movement that one can dance... in
the sunshine,
in the open country, without being in
harmony with the life
and the solitude of the landscape –
every such movement is false,
in that it is out of tune in the midst
of nature's harmonious lines.
That is why the dancer should above all
else choose movements
that express the
strength, health, nobility, ease and serenity of living
things.”
- Isadora
Duncan
”I am seeking that dance
which might be
the
divine expression of the human
spirit
through the medium of
the body's movement.”
- Isadora
Duncan
”I have discovered the
dance.
I have discovered the
art
which has been lost for
two thousand years.”
- Isadora
Duncan
”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.”
- Isadora
Duncan
”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.”
- Isadora
Duncan
”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.”
- Isadora
Duncan
”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.”
- Isadora
Duncan
”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.”
- Isadora
Duncan
”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.”
- Isadora
Duncan
“Perhaps he was a bit
different from other
people,
but what really
sympathetic person is not a little mad?”
- Isadora Duncan
”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.”
- Isadora
Duncan
”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.”
- Isadora
Duncan
”The only dance masters
I could have were
Jean-Jacques Rousseau,
Walt Whitman and Nietzsche.”
- Isadora
Duncan
”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.”
- Isadora
Duncan
”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'.”
- Isadora
Duncan
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