Isadora Duncan Quotes

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

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

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.

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.

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.

Adieu, mes amis. Je vais à la gloire. Farewell my friends. I go to glory. Isadora Duncan's last words before her scarf caught in a car wheel, breaking her neck.

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.

Movements are as eloquent as words.

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

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

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.

Oh Woman, come before us, before our eyes longing for beauty, and tired of the ugliness of civilization, come in simple tunics, letting us see the line and harmony of the body beneath, and dance for us. Dance us the sweetness of life. Give us again the sweetness and the beauty of the true dance, give us again the joy of seeing the simple unconscious pure body of a woman. Like a great call it has come, and women must hear it and answer it.

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.

We're free agents. We can do what we want." Free agents. When my mother used those words she'd wave her keys. "We're like two bachelorettes," she'd say as we backed out of the drive. The road she took was always by the sea. Floods never put her off. "It'll pass" she'd say when I braced myself in the seat. If a wave hit the car, she'd drive on, floating sometimes for seconds. The wipers could clear off the sand and small stones. Seaweed was the problem. Not the one with poppers. That landed with a thud and rolled like a body off the windscreens. No, the problem was the smaller stuff, bright green and fine that wrapped itself like a feather boa around the side mirror. Usually, with one hand, she could throw it off. But sometimes, it took both her hands as if it were a scarf around Isadora Duncan's neck.

Many women to whom I have preached the doctrine of freedom have weakly replied, 'But who is to support the children?' It seems to me that if the marriage ceremony is needed as a protection to insure the enforced support of children, then you are marrying a man who, you suspect, would under certain conditions, refuse to support his children, and it is a pretty low-down proposition. For you are marrying a man whom you already suspect of being a villain. But I have not so poor an opinion of men that I believe the greater percentage of them to be such low specimens of humanity.

La danza è l’eterno risorgere del Sole.

Don't let them tame you.

I bring you the dance. I bring you the idea that is going to revolutionise our entire epoch. Where have I discovered it? By the Pacific Ocean, but the waving pine-forests of Sierra Nevada. I have seen the ideal figure of youthful American dancing over the top of the Rockies. The supreme poet of our country is Walt Whitman. I have discovered the dance that is worthy of the poem of Walt Whitman. I am indeed the spiritual daughter of Walt Whitman. For the children of America I will create a new dance that will express America. I bring to your theatre the vital soul that it lacks, the soul of the dancer. For you know...that the birth of the theatre was the dance, that the first actor was the dancer. He danced and sang. That was the birth of the tragedy, and until the dancer in all his spontaneous great art returns to the theatre, your theatre will not live in its true expression!

anecdote tells of a meeting in 1923 between Nobel Prize laureate Anatole France and the beautiful and talented dancer Isadora Duncan. Discussing the then popular eugenics movement, Duncan said, ‘Just imagine a child with my beauty and your brains!’ France responded, ‘Yes, but imagine a child with my beauty and your brains.’)

Art that is not religious is not art [but] mere merchandise.

I always thought that if I suffered enough in service of Art, if I laid down my life to please the world, I could live in peace," Duncan reflects shortly after the death of her children. "Now I know that the world will consume everything in its path. Art is not even an appetizer to the horrors of the world. The world consumes horror itself and savors it and is never sated.

between Nobel Prize laureate Anatole France and the beautiful and talented dancer Isadora Duncan. Discussing the then popular eugenics movement, Duncan said, ‘Just imagine a child with my beauty and your brains!’ France responded, ‘Yes, but imagine a child with my beauty and your brains.’) Well then, why not rig the lottery? Fertilise several eggs, and choose the one with the best combination.

Sexual reproduction is a lottery. (A famous – and probably apocryphal – anecdote tells of a meeting in 1923 between Nobel Prize laureate Anatole France and the beautiful and talented dancer Isadora Duncan. Discussing the then popular eugenics movement, Duncan said, ‘Just imagine a child with my beauty and your brains!’ France responded, ‘Yes, but imagine a child with my beauty and your brains.’)

Duncan kept his hand on Violet's and talked to her about terrible concerts he had attended back when the Quagmire parents were alive, and she was happy to hear his stories. Isadora began working on a poem about libraries and showed Klaus what she had written in her notebook, and Klaus was happy to offer suggestions. And Sunny snuggled down in Violet's lap and chewed on the armrest of her seat, happy to bite something that was so sturdy.

Gross was a habitué of the decadent bohemian café society of Munich’s Schwabing district—a kind of early-twentieth-century Haight-Ashbury—and embraced the radical social ideas prevalent in Monte Verità, the “Mountain of Truth,” an early alternative community established in Ascona, Switzerland, in 1900, where as the historian Martin Green argued, “the counterculture began.”15 Notables such as Hermann Hesse, Rudolf Steiner, Isadora Dun-can, and many more made the trek to Monte Verità to take the nature cure, practice nudity (not Steiner), meditate, grow their own vegetables, enjoy “free love,” and in general cast off the ills of an increasingly mechanized society. Gross was initially drawn to psychoanalysis because, with its emphasis on the dangers of sexual repression, it seemed a potent weapon against authoritarianism.

Apparently the climax had come when he had suggested to Tamiris that in the historic sweep of dance history she was ideally equipped to dance the great Isadora Duncan. He expected flattered appreciation but Tamiris regarded him coldly, demanding, “And who will dance Tamiris?

From cutting the throat of a young calf to cutting the throat of our brothers and sisters is but a step. While we are ourselves the living graves of murdered animals, how can we expect any ideal conditions of the earth!" -Isadora Duncan

If there is one word, by the way, that triggers all the inherent terrors I have ever felt about the institution of marriage, it is coverture. This is exactly what the dancer Isadora Duncan was talking about when she wrote that “any intelligent woman who reads the marriage contract and then goes into it deserves all the consequences.

Isadora Duncan Dancing Like sculpture at first. Then, as if the sun rose in her, long gesture. A small smile; then very much so. The beauty of the rite shone; whirling. She whirled and whirled, flaming. Only the body spoke. The body carried her language. Her dance a spell swirling the air, a spiral she was and her shawl, the half circle around her, the curve of the sea-shore and girl, the dancer and the dance apart… (Trascreated by Cathy Strisik and Veronica Golos based on Katalin N. Ullrich’s translation.)