quotations about dance & dancing
When you have a garden full of pretty flowers, you don't demand of them, "What do you mean? What is your significance?" Dancers are just flowers, and flowers grow without any literal meaning, they are just beautiful. We're like flowers. A flower doesn't tell you a story. It's in itself a beautiful thing.
GEORGE BALANCHINE
"Balanchine Said", The New Yorker, January 26, 2009
Never give a sword to a man who can't dance.
CONFUCIUS
The Analects
See the music, hear the dance.
GEORGE BALANCHINE
attributed, Dancing for Balanchine
People have asked me why I chose to be a dancer. I did not choose. I was chosen to be a dancer, and with that, you live all your life.
MARTHA GRAHAM
Blood Memory
You can't dance cheerfully. Dancing is too important. It can be wild or solemn or gay or lewd or art for art's sake, but it can't be cheerful.
REX STOUT
Champagne for One
At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless;
Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is.
T. S. ELIOT
The Four Quartets
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
Kitty Foyle
Oh the lights dim while we're dancing
Yeah the floor is shaking
In this disco heaven
(Oh disco heaven)
LADY GAGA
"Disco Heaven", The Fame
Dancing imitates character, emotion, and action, by rhythmical movement.
ARISTOTLE
Poetics
Unlike music ... dance has a strong capacity for representation and imitation, which suggests that dance may have further served as an early form of language. Indeed, dance is the quintessential gesture language.
STEVEN BROWN
Scientific American, Jul. 2008
Not dancing well, I never danced at all--and how grievously has my heart ached when others where in the full enjoyment of that conversation which I had no right even to partake.
WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR
The Letters of Walter Savage Landor to Marguerite
We look at the dance to impart the sensation of living in an affirmation of life, to energize the spectator into keener awareness of the vigor, the mystery, the humor, the variety, and the wonder of life.
MARTHA GRAHAM
attributed, Modern Dance (Stewart)
We should consider every day lost on which we have not danced at least once.
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE
attributed, Geary's Guide to the World's Great Aphorists
To dance is to be out of yourself. Larger, more beautiful, more powerful. This is power; it is glory on earth, and it is yours for the taking.
AGNES DE MILLE
attributed, Women Know Everything!
Move while you're watching me
Dance with the enemy
I've got a remedy
Oh, oh-oh, oh-oh
Move while you're watching me
Dance with the enemy
Here is my remedy
Oh, oh-oh, oh-oh
LITTLE BOOTS
"Remedy"
"Can you dance?" said the girl. Lancelot gave a short, amused laugh. He was a man who never let his left hip know what his right hip was doing.
P. G. WODEHOUSE
Meet Mr. Mulliner
If the Louvre custodian can,
If the Guard Republican can,
If Van Gogh and Matisse and Cézanne can,
Baby, you can can-can too.
COLE PORTER
"Can-Can"
Dancing for the young is dangerous; for the old it is ridiculous.
BUSSY-RABUTIN
attributed, Day's Collacon
Dance, dance, for the figure is easy
The tune is catching and will not stop
Dance till the stars come down from the rafters
Dance, dance, dance till you drop.
W. H. AUDEN
Selected Poems