This release March 6, 2004.
Alphabetical links: =A= =B= =C= =D= =E= =F= =G= =H= =I= =J= =K= =L= =M= =N= =O= =P= =Q= =R= =S= =T= =U= =V= =W= =X= =Y= =Z= =Unattributed=
In life as in dance: Grace glides on blistered
feet.
--Alice Abrams
Dance isn't something that can be explained in words; it has to be
danced.
--Paige Arden
Everything in the universe has rhythm. Everything
dances.
--Maya Angelou
I have no desire to prove anything by dancing. I have never used it as an
outlet or a means of expressing myself. I just dance. I just put my feet in the
air and move them
around.
--Fred Astaire
I would rather dance as a ballerina, though faultily, than as a flawless
clown.
--Margaret Atwood in "Lady Oracle"
Dance till the stars come down from the rafters
Dance, Dance, Dance till
you
drop.
--W. H. Auden
All the dancer's gestures are signs of things, and the dance called rational,
because it aptly signifies and displays something over and above the pleasure of
the
senses.
--St. Augustine
Fine dancing, I believe like virtue, must be its own reward. Those who are
standing by are usually thinking of something very
different.
--Jane Austen
A dance is a measured pace, as a verse is a measured
speech.
--Sir Francis Bacon
Dance is music made
visible.
--George Balanchine
First comes the sweat. Then comes the beauty if you're very lucky and have
said your
prayers.
--George Balanchine
Someone once said that dancers work just as hard as policeman, always alert,
always tense, but see, policeman don't have to be beautiful at the same
time.
--George Balanchine
I don't want people who want to dance, I want people who have to
dance.
--George Balanchine
The mirror is not you. The mirror is you looking at
yourself.
--George Balanchine
You haven't got anything to dance about until you're over thirty-five
anyway.
--Bert Balladine
What Horace says is
Eheu fugaces
Anni labuntur, Postume,
Postume,
Years glide away and are lost to me, lost to me!
Now, when
the folks in the dance sport their merry toes,
Taglionis and Ellslers,
Duvernays, and Ceritos,
Sighing I murmur, "O mihi
praeteritos!"
--Canon R. H. Barham
Eheu... Horace, Odes ii,
14: "Alas, Postumus, Postumus, the fleeting years roll by."'
O mihi... Beginning of Vergil, Aeneid 8:560; entire line is "O that
Jupiter would bring the vanished years back to me."
The essence of all art is to have pleasure in giving
pleasure.
--Mikhail Baryshnikov
I do not try to dance better than anyone else. I only try to dance better
than
myself.
--Mihkail Baryshnikov
Dancing can reveal all the mystery that music
conceals.
--Charles Baudelaire
There are short-cuts to happiness, and dancing is one of
them.
--Vicki Baum
Dance first. Think later. It's the natural
order.
--Samuel Beckett
A correct execution of an adagio is the ne plus ultra of
our art; and I look on it as the touch-stone of the
dancer.
--Carlo Blasis
Ballet is not technique but a way of expression that comes more closely to
the inner language of man than any
other.
--George Borodin
When I dance, I cannot judge, I cannot hate, I cannot separate myself from
life. I can only be joyful and whole, that is why I
dance.
--Hans Bos
It is not so much upon the number of exercises, as the care with which they
are done, that progreses and skill
depend.
--Auguste Bournonville
I learned to act by watching Martha Graham dance, and I learned to dance by
watching Charlie Chaplin
act.
--Louise Brooks
All there is to be said for work compared to dance is that the latter is so
much
easier.
--Heywood Broun
The one thing that can solve most of our problems is dancing.
Any problem
in the world can be solved by
dancing.
--James Brown (2 versions)
A child sings before it speaks, dances almost before it walks, music is with
us from the
beginning.
--Pamela Brown
Dance can give the inarticulate a
voice
--Pamela Brown
The human animal dances wildest on the edge of the
grave.
--Rita Mae Brown
Dance every performance as if it were your
last.
--Erik Bruhn
In life, as in art, the beautiful moves in
curves.
--Bulwer-Lytton
On with the dance! Let joy be
unconfined.
--Lord Byron
Kind are her answers,
But her performance keeps no
day;
Breaks time, as dancers
From their own Music when they
stray.
--Thomas Campion
The further off from England the nearer is to France--
Then turn not pale,
beloved snail, but come and join the
dance.
--Lewis Carroll
Classical dancing is like being a mother: if you've never done it, you can't
imagine how hard it
is.
--Harriet Cavalli
La danse, c'est le mouvement, et le mouvement, c'est la
vie.
("Dance is movement, and movement is
life.")
--Ludmilla Chiriaeff (Founder, Les Grands Ballets Canadiens)
For hardly any man dances when sober, unless he is insane. Nor does he dance while alone, nor at a respectable and moderate party. Dancing is the final phase of a wild party with fancy decorations and a multitude of delights.
[Nemo enim fere saltat sobrius, nisi insanit, neque in solitudine neque in
convivio moderato et honesto. tempestivi convivi, amoeni loci, multarum
deliciarum comes est extrema
saltatio.]
--Marcus Tullius Cicero, Pro Murena
You've got to sing like you don't need the money,
Love like you'll never
get hurt.
You've got to dance like no one is watching,
It's gotta come
from the heart, if you want it to
work.
--Susannah Clark and Richard Leigh
Dancing is at once rational & healthful: it gives animal spirits; it is
the natural amusement of young people, & such it has been from the days of
Moses.
--William Cobbett
We have no adequate conception of the perfection of the ancient tragic dance.
The pleasure which the greeks received from it had for its basis difference;
& the more unfit the vehicle, the more lively was the curiosity &
intense the delights at seeing the difficulty
overcome.
--S. T. Coleridge
How inimitably graceful children are in general--before they learn to
dance.
--S. T. Coleridge
Dancing is like dreaming with your
feet!
--Constanze
Good choreography fuses eye, ear, and
mind.
--Arlene Croce
1. Beginning dancer. Knows nothing.
2. Intermediate dancer. Knows
everything. Too good to dance with beginners.
3. Hotshot dancer. Too good to
dance with anyone.
4. Advanced dancer. Dances everything. Especially with
beginners.
--Attributed to Dick Crum(?), a folk dance teacher
I'd rather learn from one bird how to sing than to teach ten thousand stars
how not to
dance.
--e. e. cummings
The only way to do it is to do
it.
--Merce Cunningham
Dance is your pulse, your heartbeat, your breathing. It's the rhythym of your
life. Its the expression in time and movement, in happiness, joy, sadness and
envy.
--Jaques D'Amboise
So, I think I would say, enjoy the process of learning to dance. The process
of our profession, and not its final achievement, is the heart and soul of
dance.
--Jacques d'Amboise
Ballet technique is arbitrary and very difficult. It never becomes easy--it
becomes
possible.
--Agnes de Mille
To dance is to be out of yourself, larger, more powerful, more beautiful.
This is power, it is glory on earth and it is yours for the
taking.
--Agnes de Mille
Toe dancing is a dandy attention getter, second only to
screaming.
--Agnes de Mille
The truest expression of a people is in its dance and in its music. Bodies
never
lie.
--Agnes de Mille
There is a bit of insanity in dancing that does everybody a great deal of
good.
--Edwin Denby
You don't have to know about ballet to enjoy it, all you have to do is look
at
it.
--Edwin Denby
When you are fifty, you're neither young nor old; you're just uninteresting.
When you are sixty, and still dancing, you become something of a curiosity. And
boy! if you hit seventy, and can still get a foot off the ground, you're
phenomenal!
--Ruth St Denis
I have performed for thousands when they found me exotic, the vogue, daring,
but I have danced, at any given time, for about ten people.... They were the
ones that left the theater forever different from the way they were when they
came in. All of my long, long life, I have danced for those
ten.
--Ruth St. Denis
O, Love's but a dance,
Where Time plays the fiddle!
See
the couples advance,--
O, Love's but a dance!
A whisper, a
glance,
"Shall we twirl down the middle?"
O, Love's but a
dance,
Where Time plays the
fiddle!
--Henry Austin Dobson
Dancing is the last word in life. In dancing one draws nearer to
oneself.
--Jean Dubuffet
Dancing is the poetry of the
foot.
--John Dryden
Dancing: The Highest Intelligence in the Freest
Body.
--Isadora Duncan
If I could tell you what it meant, there would be no point in dancing
it.
"No, I can't explain the dance to you; If I could say it--I wouldn't have
to dance
it!"
--Isadora Duncan (2 versions)
Dancing is the loftiest, the most moving, the most beautiful of the arts,
because it is not mere translation or abstraction from life; it is life
itself.
--Havelock Ellis
Dance is so important in the world. It needs no language. Our bodies speak a
language of its
own.
--Ibrahim Farrah
My friends and I had taken dancing lessons, although none of us would ever
admit it. In those depression days, a friend of my mother was trying to make a
living by teaching dancing in the evening, in an upstairs dance studio. There
was a back door to the place, and she arranged it so the young men could come up
through the back way without being
seen.
--Richard Feynman
Dancing's just a conversation between two people. Talk to
me.
--Hope Floats
Great artists are people who find ways to be themselves in their art. Any
sort of pretension induces mediocrity in art and life
alike.
--Margot Fonteyn
I explained it when I danced
it.
--Margot Fonteyn (asked to explain a performance)
Genius is another word for magic, and the whole point of magic is that it is
inexplicable.
--Margot Fonteyn
The one important thing I have learnt over the years is the difference
between taking one's work seriously and taking oneself seriously. The first is
imperative and the second
disastrous.
--Margot Fonteyn
I have the same opinion of dances that physicians have of mushrooms: the best
of them are good for
nothing.
--St Francis de Sales
Good dancers have mostly better heels than
heads.
--Thomas Fuller
Correction does much, but encouragement does more.
Encouragement after
censure is as the sun after a
shower.
--Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Samuel Goldwyn: What kind of dancing does Martha Graham do?
Associate:
Modern dancing.
Goldwyn: I don't want her then, modern dancing is so old
fashioned.
--Samuel Goldwyn
Great dancers are not great because of their technique; they are great
because of their
passion.
--Martha Graham
Its what I always wanted to do, to show the laughter, the fun the joy of
dance.
--Martha Graham
Dance is the hidden language of the
soul.
--Martha Graham
Dancing is just discovery, discovery,
discovery.
--Martha Graham
Movement never lies. It is a barometer telling the state of the soul's
weather.
--Martha Graham
Dance is a song of the body. Either of joy or
pain.
--Martha Graham
Wherever a dancer stands is holy
ground.
--Martha Graham
Dance is communication, and so the great challenge is to speak clearly,
beautifully, and with
inevitability.
--Martha Graham
Nothing is more revealing than
movement.
--Martha Graham
Freedom to a dancer means discipline. That is what technique is
for--liberation.
--Martha Graham
The spine is the tree of life. Respect
it.
--Martha Graham
Technical perfection is insufficient. It is an orphan without the true soul
of the
dancer.
--Sylvie Guillem
To me, boxing is like a ballet, except there's no music, no choreography, and
the dancers hit each
other.
--Jack Handey
The dance is a poem of which each movement is a
word.
--Mata Hari
Learning to walk sets you free. Learning to dance gives you the greatest
freedom of all: to express your whole self, the person you
are.
--Melissa Hayden
Aren't all ballets sexy? I think they should be. I can think of nothing more
kinky than a prince chasing a swan around all
night.
--Sir Robert Murray Helpman
For though man has sorrow and grief in his soul, at once he forgets his dark
thoughts and remembers not his troubles. Such is the holy gift of
Terpsichore.
--Hesiod, 7th century BC
So you can't dance? Not at all? Not even one step? . . . How can you say that
you've taken any trouble to live when you won't even
dance?
--Hermann Hesse
He who cannot dance puts the blame on the
floor.
--Hindu proverb
Dance for yourself. If someone else understands, good. If not, no matter. Go
right on doing what interests you, and do it until it stops interesting
you.
Dance for yourself, if someone understands good. If not then no matter,
go right on doing what you
love.
--Louis Horst (2 versions)
Oh, 'tis jesting, dancing, drinking
Spins the heavy world
around.
--A. E. Housman
==I==
==J==
Common sense and a sense of humor are the same thing, moving at different
speeds. A sense of humor is just common sense,
dancing.
--Clive James
Dance is bigger than the physical body. Think bigger than that. When you
extend your arm, it doesn't stop at the end of your fingers, because you're
dancing bigger than that: your dancing
spirit.
--Judith Jamison
All dancing girls are nineteen years
old.
--Japanese proverb
'Tis not enough that ev'ry Stander-by
No glaring Errors in your Steps can
'spy;
The Dance and Musick must so nicely meet,
Each Note must seem an
Eccho to your Feet;
A nameless Grace must in each Movement dwell,
Which
words can ne'er express, nor Precepts tell; . .
.
--Soame Jenyns
[Lord Chesterfield's Letters] teach the morals of a whore, and the manners of
a dancing
master.
--Samuel Johnson
What we hope ever to do with ease, we must first learn to do with
diligence.
--Samuel Johnson
==K==
==L==
It takes an athlete to dance, but an artist to be a
dancer.
--Shanna LaFleur
Technique--bodily control--must be mastered only because the body must not
stand in the way of the soul's expression.
The only reason for mastering
technique is to make sure the body does not prevent the soul from expressing
itself.
--La Meri (2 versions)
We ought to dance with rapture that we might be alive...and part of the
living, incarnate
cosmos.
--D. H. Lawrence
They dined on mince, and slices of quince,
Which they ate
with a runcible spoon;
And hand in hand, on the edge of the
sand,
They danced by the light of the
moon.
--Edward Lear
Football isn't a contact sport; it's a collision sport. Dancing is a contact
sport.
--Vince Lombardi
Dance is an art that imprints on the soul. It is with you every moment, it
expresses itself in everything you
do.
--Shirley Maclaine
Then come the lights shining on you from above. You are a performer. You
forget all you learned, the process of technique, the fear, the pain, you even
forget who you are you become one with the music, the lights, indeed one with
the
dance.
--Shirley Maclaine
Even the ears must
dance.
--Natalia Makarova
Poetry is like dancing. Not all of us can be ballet dancers but all of us
dance. Everyone has a poet inside of him struggling to get
out.
--Marks and Spencer spokesman on the hiring of an in-house poet to help bring
out the creativity of its staff.
The ballet. I saw in the fugitive beauty of a dancer's gesture a symbol of
life. It was achieved at the cost of unending effort but, with all the forces of
gravity against it, a fleeting poise in mid-air, a lovely attitude worthy to be
made immortal in a bas-relief, it was lost as soon as it was gained and there
remained no more than the memory of an exquisite emotion. So life, lived
variously and largely, becomes a work of art only when brought to its beautiful
conclusion and is reduced to nothingness in the moment when it arrives at
perfection.
--W. Somerset Maugham
The Marquesan girls dance all over; not only do their feet dance, but their
arms, hands, fingers, ay, their very eyes seem to dance in their
heads.
--Herman Melville
He [Gene Kelly] once told me dancing was a man's game, as much of a sport as
baseball itself. And he made us believe that. He changed our minds and suddenly,
all of America wanted to dance just like Gene
Kelly.
--Liza Minnelli
Those who danced were thought to be quite insane by those who could not hear
the
music.
--Angela Monet (also attributed to Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche)
Come & trip it as ye go
On the light fantastic
toe.
--John Milton
All the ills of mankind,
All the tragic misfortunes that fill the history
books,
All the political blunders,
All the failures of the great
leaders,
Have arisen merely from a lack of skill at
dancing.
--from a Molière play
Dancing is wonderful training for girls; it's the first way you learn to
guess what a man is going to do before he does
it.
--Christopher Morley
We should consider every day lost on which we have not danced at least
once.
--Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
I do not know what the spirit of a philosopher could more wish to be than a
good dancer. For the dance is his ideal, also his fine art; finally also the
only kind of piety he knows, his "divine
service."
-- Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
I should not believe in a God who does not
dance.
--Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
Dancing in all its forms cannot be excluded from the curriculum of all noble
education: dancing with the feet, with ideas, with words, and, need I add that
one must also be able to dance with the
pen?
--Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
Through dancing many maidens have been unmaidened, whereby I may say it is
the storehouse and nursery of
bastardy.
--John Northbrooke
When the music and dance create with accord...their magic captivates both the
heart and the
mind.
--Jean Georges Noverre
==O==
To dance is to give oneself up to the rhythms of all
life.
--Dr Maya V. Patel
Master technique and then forget about it and be
natural.
--Anna Pavlova
Hence it is from the representation of things spoken by means of posture and
gesture that the whole of the art of dance has been
elaborated.
--Plato
To sing well and to dance is to be well
educated.
--Plato
True ease in writing comes from art, not chance,
As those move easiest who
have learned to
dance.
--Alexander Pope
And men must walk at least before they
dance.
--Alexander Pope
Music begins to atrophy when it departs too far from the
dance.
--Ezra Pound
A cathedral, a wave of a storm, a dancer's leap, never turn out to be as high
as we had
hoped.
--Marcel Proust
Ballet is a dance executed by the human
soul.
--Pushkin
==Q==
Dance is like life, it exists as you're flitting through it, and when it's
over, it's
done.
--Jerome Robbins
You need the courage to seem foolish and to
fail.
--Steven A. Rosenberg (1993)
If a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing
badly.
--Gilbert Keith Chesterton
All the gestures of children are graceful; the reign of distortion and
unnatural attitudes commences with the introduction of the dancing
master.
--Sir Joshua Reynolds
The gymnasium of running, walking on stilts, climbing, etc. stells and makes
hardy single powers and muscles, but dancing, like a corporeal poesy,
embellishes, exercises, and equalizes all the muscles at
once.
-- Jean Paul Richter
(Stell: to place firmly in
position.)
I was a ballerina. I had to quit after I injured a groin muscle. It wasn't
mine.
--Rita Rudner
I see dance being used as communication between body and soul, to express
what it too deep to find for
words.
--Ruth St. Denis
Talk about dance? Dance is not something to talk about. Dance is to
dance.
--Peter Saint James
To those of us with real understanding, dancing is the only pure art
form.
--Charles Schulz [in Peanuts (Snoopy speaking)]
To live is to dance, to dance is to
live.
--Charles Schulz [in Peanuts (Snoopy speaking)]
O come ye in peace here, or come ye in war,
Or to dance at our bridal,
young Lord
Lochinvar?
--Sir Walter Scott
There was never a merry world since the fairies left off
dancing.
--John Selden
He capers, he dances, he has eyes of youth, he writes verses, he speaks
holiday, he smells April and
May.
--Shakespeare (Merry Wives of Windsor)
She is your treasure, she must have a husband;
I must dance bare-foot on
her wedding day,
And, for your love to her, lead apes in
hell.
--Shakespeare (Taming of the Shrew)
When you do dance, I wish you
A wave o' the sea, that you
might ever do
Nothing but
that.
--Shakespeare (Winter's Tale)
Wooing, wedding, and repenting, is as a Scotch jig, a measure, and a
cinque-pace: the first suit is hot and hasty, like a Scotch jig, and full as
fantastical; the wedding, mannerly modest as a measure, full of state and
ancientry; and then comes repentance, and with his bad legs, falls into the
cinque-pace faster and faster, till he sink into his
grave.
--Shakespeare (Much Ado About Nothing)
Dance is the only art of which we ourselves are the stuff of which it is
made.
--Ted Shawn
There was an old clerk of Columbus
Who wearied of totalling
numbus,
So he moved to East Lansing
And spent his time dancing
Maxixes, merengues, and
rhumbus.
--Col. G. L. Sicherman sicherman@lucent.com
Classical language and musicality are not simply effete traditions belonging
to the bygone upper classes. The vocabulary and manner of classical ballet
express a high order of discipline and restraint, a sense of harmony with forces
larger and more lasting than the
individual.
--Marsha Siegel
Dancing is silent
poetry.
--Simonides
But oh, she dances such a way!
No sun upon an Easter-day
Is half so
fine a
sight
--Sir John Suckling
These sort of boobies think that people come to balls to do nothing but
dance; whereas everyone knows that the real business of a ball is either to look
out for a wife, to look after a wife, or to look after somebody else's
wife.
--Robert Smith Surtees
All night have the roses heard
The flute, violin,
bassoon;
All night has the casement jessamine stirr'd
To the
dancers dancing in tune;
Till a silence fell with the waking
bird,
And a hush with the setting
moon.
--Alfred, Lord Tennyson
They who love dancing too much seem to have more brains in their feet than in
their
head.
--Terence (c. 190-159 BC)
Dancing is like bank robbery, it takes split second
timing.
--Twyla Tharp
==U==
==V==
Whoever has seen the masked at a ball dance amicably together, and take hold
of hands without knowing each other, leaving the next moment to meet no more,
can form an idea of the
world.
--Vauvenargues
Dancing is an art because it is subject to
rules.
--Voltaire
Let us read and let us dance--two amusements that will never do any harm to
the
world.
--Voltaire
==W==
==X==
==Y==
When I play on my fiddle in Dooney
Folk dance like a wave on the
sea.
--William Butler Yeats
O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,
How can we know the dancer
from the
dance?
--William Butler Yeats
...rhythmically challenged
dancelexic
--Younta [from Icono Clast]
==Z==
==Unattributed==
A day I don't dance is a day I don't
live.
--Anonymous Tunisian dancer
A ceilidh is like aerobics, only the music's better and you get to cuddle
someone most of the
time!
--Someone's Ex-girlfriend
In either the Apocrypha or the Dead Sea Scrolls, Jesus says: "Blessed are the dancers...." [ellipsis in original]
The waltz is a dance of quite too loose a character, and unmarried ladies
should refrain from it...very young married ladies may be allowed to waltz if it
is very
seldom....
--From "The Gentleman and Lady's Book of Politeness," 2nd American edition,
Boston: Allen and Ticknor and Carter, Hendee & Co., 1833.
Anyone who says sunshine brings happiness has never danced in the
rain.
--Source unknown
The Ballet toe shoe is one of the few instruments of torture to survive
intact into our
time.
--Source unknown
Contra dancing is the most fun you can have with your clothes
on!
--Source unknown
Dance is a delicate balance between perfection and
beauty.
--Source unknown
Do you know why Baptists refuse to make love standing up?
They're afraid
it will lead to
dancing!
--Source unknown
I wonder if sex is as fun as
dancing.
--Source unknown
I table dance only for money and
sex.
--Source unknown
If you're on thin ice you might as well be
dancing.
--Source unknown
It's not the turning that hard in pirouettes, it's that you gotta keep on
doin'
it.
--Source unknown
Remember, Ginger Rogers did everything that Fred Astaire did, backwards and
on high
heels.
--Source unknown
(Attributed variously to Linda Ellerbee, Ann
Richards, and Faith Whittlesey, and--apparenlty spuriously--to Rogers herself)
Socrates learned to dance when he was 70 because he felt that an essential
part of himself had been
neglected.
--Source unknown
The dance is simply the luminous manisfestation of the dancer's soul, natural
but not intiative speaking in movement out of himself, that which is greater
than all parts of the
self.
--Source unknown
They say practice makes perfect, but no one is perfect so why then
practice?
--Source unknown
Writing about music is like dancing about
architecture.
--Source unknown
You can dance anywhere, even if only in your
heart.
--Source unknown
Safety pins are a bellydancer's best
friend.
--Source unknown