Isadora Duncan Quotes

#1. 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

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

Isadora Duncan

#3. 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.

Isadora Duncan

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

Isadora Duncan

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

Isadora Duncan

#6. Memories are less tangible than dreams.

Isadora Duncan

#7. 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

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

Isadora Duncan

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

Isadora Duncan

#10. 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.

Isadora Duncan

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

Isadora Duncan

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

Isadora Duncan

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

Isadora Duncan

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

Isadora Duncan

#15. To awaken human emotion is the highest level of art.

Isadora Duncan

#16. 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

#17. 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

#18. My motto - sans limites.

Isadora Duncan

#19. 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.

Isadora Duncan

#20. 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.

Isadora Duncan

#21. You were once wild here. Don't let them tame you.

Isadora Duncan

#22. 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.

Isadora Duncan

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

Isadora Duncan

#24. 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

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

Isadora Duncan

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

Isadora Duncan

#27. 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.

Isadora Duncan

#28. So that ends my first experience of matrimony, which I always thought a highly over-rated performance.

Isadora Duncan

#29. Don't let them tame you.

Isadora Duncan

#30. 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

Isadora Duncan

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

Isadora Duncan

#32. 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.

Isadora Duncan

#33. 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

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

Isadora Duncan

#35. Dancing: The Highest Intelligence in the Freest Body.

Isadora Duncan

#36. 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

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

Isadora Duncan

#38. 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.

Isadora Duncan

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

Isadora Duncan

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

Isadora Duncan

#41. Movements are as eloquent as words.

Isadora Duncan

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

Isadora Duncan

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

Isadora Duncan

#44. With what price we pay for the glory of motherhood.

Isadora Duncan

#45. 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.

Isadora Duncan

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

Isadora Duncan

#47. Others loved themselves, money, theories, power: Lenin loved his fellow men ... Lenin was God, as Christ was God, because God is Love and Christ and Lenin were all Love!

Isadora Duncan

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

Isadora Duncan

#49. Farewell my friends, I go to glory.

Isadora Duncan

#50. America knows nothing of food, love, or art.

Isadora Duncan

#51. 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.

Isadora Duncan

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

Isadora Duncan

#53. These people seemed so enwrapped in snobbishness and the glory of being rich that they had no art sense whatever.

Isadora Duncan

#54. People don't live nowadays: they get about ten percent out of life.

Isadora Duncan

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

Isadora Duncan

#56. 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

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

Isadora Duncan

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

Isadora Duncan

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

Isadora Duncan

#60. 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.'

Isadora Duncan

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

Isadora Duncan

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

Isadora Duncan

#63. 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

#64. 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

#65. 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

#66. I was born by the sea, and I have noticed that all the great events of my life have taken place by the sea. My first idea of movement, of the dance, certainly came from the rhythm of the waves.

Isadora Duncan

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

Isadora Duncan

#68. 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.

Isadora Duncan

#69. I hope that schools have changed since I was a little girl. My memory of the teaching of the public schools is that it showed the brutal incomprehension of children.

Isadora Duncan

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

Isadora Duncan

#71. 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.

Isadora Duncan

#72. Art is not necessary at all. All that is necessary to make this world a better place to live in is to love - to love as Christ loved, as Buddha loved.

Isadora Duncan

#73. 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?

Isadora Duncan

#74. I do not teach children, I give them joy.

Isadora Duncan

#75. 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.

Isadora Duncan

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

Isadora Duncan