1) Do you not realize that dance is the pure act of metamorphosis? -- Paul Valéry
2) If you can talk, you can sing. If you can walk, you can dance. - -African Proverb
3) Any problem in the world can be solved by dancing. -- James Brown
4) To dance is to affirm. -- Bayard Coll
5) True ease in writing comes from art, not
chance,
As those move easiest who have learned to
dance.
-- Alexander Pope, "Essay on Criticism"
6) O body swayed to music, O brightening
glance,
How can we know the dancer from the dance?
-- William Butler Yeats, "Among School Children"
7) Dance is a sort of silent rhetoric. -- Canon Thoinot Arbeau
8) What do you dance? -- Bantu greeting to a member of another Bantu tribe
9) The aesthetic pleasure of dance is a secondary reflection of the primary, vital joy of courtship. -- Havelock Ellis
10) "To be fond of dancing was a certain step towards falling in love." -- Jane Austen
11) One may judge a king by the state of dancing during his reign. -- Chinese proverb
12) A good education consists in knowing how to sing and dance well.-- Plato, Laws
13) Dancing is the only art of which we ourselves are the stuff.-- Rahel Varnhagen
14) Every day I count wasted in which there has been no dancing. -- Nietzsche
15) A dignified and formal dance is a delicately planned geometry. -- Ruth Katz
16) The dance is the mother of all languages. -- R.G. Collingwood
17) The way people move is their autobiography in motion. -- Gerry Spence
18) Dancers are instruments, like a piano the choreographer plays. -- George Balanchine
19) Dancers are the athletes of God. -- Albert Einstein
20) No sane man will dance. -- Cicero
21) Those who dance are considered insane by those who can't hear the music. -- George Carlin
22) Dance with all the might of your body, and all the fire of your soul, in order that you may shake all melancholy out of your liver; and you need not restrain yourself with the apprehension that any lady will have the least fear that the violence of your movements will ever shake anything out of your brains. -- Lola Montez, "Hints to Gentlemen or the Art of Fascinating" (1858)
23) When you dance, you don't sweat: you glow. -- Didi
24) Music is an invisible dance, as dancing is silent music. -- Anonymous
25) If the dance is right, there shouldn't be a single superfluous movement. -- Fred Astaire
26) Dance like no one is watching you. -- Anonymous
27) Lightness of movement is the cardinal demand one has to make on a dancer. -- Frank Thiess
28) All dancing girls are nineteen years old. -- Japanese proverb
29) The mirror is not you. The mirror is you
looking at yourself. -- George Balanchine
For a visual
rendering of this idea, using one of Lois Greenfield's splendid images, click HERE.
30 "Whenever you dance remember you should feel as though you are in love with your partner, even if you have just met him" -- Megata Tsunumi
31) Everyone has seen people dancing all night. But take a man
and make him dance for a quarter of an hour without music and see if he can bear
it.
-- Maurice de Saxe
32) After I stopped dancing, I was unable to listen to beautiful music. -- Suzanne Farrell
33) Never criticize your dance partner. -- Brave Combo
DANCE IS THE MOTHER OF ALL LANGUAGES
"Speech is after all only a system
of gestures, having the peculiarity that each gesture produces a characteristic
sound, so that it can be perceived through the ear as well as through the eye.
Listening to a speaker instead of looking at him tends to make us think of
speech as essentially a system of sounds; but it is not; essentially it is a
system of gestures made with the lungs and larynx, and the cavities of the mouth
and nose. We get still further away from the fundamental facts about speech when
we think of it as something that can be written and read, forgetting that
writing, in our clumsy notations, can represent only a small part of the spoken
sound, where pitch, stress, tempo and rhythm, are almost entirely ignored...
Every language in this way a specialized form of bodily gesture, and in this
sense it may be said that the dance is the mother of all
languages."
-- R.G.
Collingwood, The Principles of Art
"Alas! our dancing days are no
more."
George Washington on the Value of
Dance
I thought that visitors to this site might like to see a poignant expression of George Washington's love of dance. In a letter dated Nov 12, 1799, to the Assembly in Alexandria, declining their invitation to be a member of the club, he says:
"Alas! our dancing days are no more. We wish, however, all those who have a relish for so agreeable and innocent an amusement all the pleasure the season will afford them. . . ."
More good dance aphorisms -- assembled by Professor Tom!