Isadora Duncan Quotes

You were once wild here. Don’t let them tame you.

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

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

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 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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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