Quotes by Isadora Duncan - Page 2

I would rather live in Russia on black bread and vodka than in the United States at the best hotels. America knows nothing of food, love or art.
Isadora Duncan / Dancer
Art
Food
America
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Most human beings today waste some 25 to 30 years of their lives before they break through the actual and conventional lies which surround them.
Isadora Duncan / Dancer
Break
Break Through
Conventional
Human Beings
Lying
Surround
Waste
Years
Actual
Beings
Lies
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Art is not necessary at all. All that is necessary to make this world a better place to live in is to love - to love as Christ loved, as Buddha loved.
Isadora Duncan / Dancer
Art
Love
Better Place
Christ
World
Love Art World
Loved
Necessary
To Love
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My art is just an effort to express the truth of my being in gesture and movement. It has taken me long years to find even one absolutely true movement.
Isadora Duncan / Dancer
Art
Dance
Taken
Years
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The artist is the only lover; he alone has the pure vision of beauty, and love is the vision of the soul when it is permitted to gaze upon immortal beauty.
Isadora Duncan / Dancer
Beauty
Love
Artist
Soul
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The Dance of the Future will have to become again a high religious art as it was with the Greeks. For art which is not religious is not art, it is mere merchandise
Isadora Duncan / Dancer
Art
Greek
Religious
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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.
Isadora Duncan / Dancer
Girl
Children
Memories
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It is only in romances that people undergo a sudden metamorphosis. In real life, even after the most terrible experiences, the main character remains exactly the same.
Isadora Duncan / Dancer
Change
Character
Real
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Others loved themselves, money, theories, power: Lenin loved his fellow men.... Lenin was God, as Christ was God, because God is Love and Christ and Lenin were all Love!
Isadora Duncan / Dancer
Men
Fellow Man
Revolution
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The real American type can never be a ballet dancer. The legs are too long, the body too supple and the spirit too free for this school of affected grace and toe walking.
Isadora Duncan / Dancer
Dance
Affected
Ballet
Ballet Dancer
Dancer
Grace
Legs
Long
Real
School
Supple
Type
Walking
Toe
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The dancer of the future will be one whose body & soul have grown so harmoniously together that the natural language of the soul will have become the movement of the body.
Isadora Duncan / Dancer
Dance
Movement
Soul
Together
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Man must speak, then sing, then dance. The speaking is the brain, the thinking man. The singing is the emotion. The dancing is the Dionysian ecstasy which carries away all.
Isadora Duncan / Dancer
Dance
Men
Dancing
Thinking
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We may not all break the Ten Commandments, but we are certainly all capable of it. Within us lurks the breaker of all laws, ready to spring out at the first real opportunity.
Isadora Duncan / Dancer
Opportunity
Break
Capable
Commandments
Ready
Real
Spring
Ten
Ten Commandments
Within
Certainly
Lurks
Real Opportunity
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A dancer, if she is great, can give to the people something that they can carry with them forever. They can never forget it, and it has changed them, though they may never know it.
Isadora Duncan / Dancer
Dance
Forever
Giving
People
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I was born by the sea, and I have noticed that all the great events of my life have taken place by the sea. My first idea of movement, of the dance, certainly came from the rhythm of the waves.
Isadora Duncan / Dancer
Ocean
Sea
Taken
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Let us first teach little children to breathe, to vibrate, to feel, and to become one with the general harmony and movement of nature. Let us first produce a beautiful human being, a dancing child.
Isadora Duncan / Dancer
Dance
Inspirational
Beautiful
Children
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The dancer's body is simply the luminous manifestation of her soul...This is the truly creative dancer, natural but not imitative, speaking in movement out of herself and out of something greater than all selves.
Isadora Duncan / Dancer
Creative
Dancer
Self
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I wonder how many parents realize that by the so-called education they are giving their children, they are only driving them into the commonplace, and depriving them of any chance of doing anything beautiful or original.
Isadora Duncan / Dancer
Beautiful
Children
Giving
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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.
Isadora Duncan / Dancer
Moon
Pain
Prayer
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I had learned to have a perfect nausea for the theatre: the continual repetition of the same words and the same gestures, night after night, and the caprices, the way of looking at life, and the entire rigmarole disgusted me.
Isadora Duncan / Dancer
Night
Perfect
Theatre
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The noblest art is the nude. This truth is recognized by all, and followed by painters, sculptors and poets. Only the dancer has forgotten it, who should remember it, as the instrument of [the dance] art is the human body itself.
Isadora Duncan / Dancer
Art
Body
Dancer
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Virtuous people are simply those who have not been tempted sufficiently, because they live in a vegetative state, or because their purposes are so concentrated in one direction that they have not had the leisure to glance around them.
Isadora Duncan / Dancer
One Direction
People
Purpose
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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.
Isadora Duncan / Dancer
Art
Dance
Beautiful
Effort
Hard Work
Research
Simple
Struggle
Taken
Writing
Art Work Hard Work
Concentrated
Gesture
Work Art Beautiful
Realize
Sentence
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Before I was born my mother was in great agony of spirit and in a tragic situation. She could take no food except iced oysters and champagne. If people ask me when I began to dance, I reply 'In my mother's womb, probably as a result of the oysters and Champagne.'
Isadora Duncan / Dancer
Mother
Oysters
Wine
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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.
Isadora Duncan / Dancer
Children
Crush
Joy
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If we seek the real source of the dance, if we go to nature, we find that the dance of the future is the dance of the past, the dance of eternity, and has been and always will be the same... The movement of waves, of winds, of the earth is ever the same lasting harmony.
Isadora Duncan / Dancer
Dance
Past
Real
Wind
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I intend to work for this dance of the future. I do not know whether I have the necessary qualities; I may have neither genius nor talent nor temperament. But I know that I have a Will; and will and energy sometimes prove greater than either genius or talent or temperament.
Isadora Duncan / Dancer
Dance
Quality
Dancing
Energy
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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 had the the satisfaction of getting my own way.
Isadora Duncan / Dancer
Able
Satisfaction
Way
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The butcher with his bloody apron incites bloodshed, murder. Why not? From cutting the throat of a young calf to cutting the throats of our brothers and sisters is but a step. While we ourselves are living graves of murdered animals, how can we expect any ideal conditions on the earth?
Isadora Duncan / Dancer
Animal
Brother
Cutting
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Eleonora Duse said, "Tell me about Deirdre and Patrick," and made me repeat to her all their little sayings and ways, and show her their photos, which she kissed and cried over. She never said "Cease to grieve", but she grieved with me, and, for the first time since their death, I felt I was not alone.
Isadora Duncan / Dancer
Grieving
Littles
Way
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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.
Isadora Duncan / Dancer
Heart
Soul
White
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When I was sixteen, I danced before an audience without music. At the end someone suddenly cried 'its Death and the Maiden'. But that was not my intention; I was only endeavoring to express my first knowledge of the underlying tragedy in all seemingly joyous manifestation. The dance according with my comprehension, should have been called 'Life and the Maiden'.
Isadora Duncan / Dancer
Dance
Should Have
Sixteen
Tragedy
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It is unheard-of, uncivilized barbarism that any woman should still be forced to bear such monstrous torture. It should be remedied. It should be stopped. It is simply absurd that, with our modern science, painless childbirth does not exist as a matter of course.... I tremble with indignation when I think ofthe unspeakable egotism and blindness of men of science who permit such atrocities when they can be remedied.
Isadora Duncan / Dancer
Men
Matter
Thinking
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There are likewise three kinds of dancers: first, those who consider dancing as a sort of gymnastic drill, made up of impersonal and graceful arabesques; second, those who, by concentrating their minds, lead the body into the rhythm of a desired emotion, expressing a remembered feeling or experience. And finally, there are those who convert the body into a luminous fluidity, surrendering it to the inspiration of the soul.
Isadora Duncan / Dancer
Dance
Dancing
Feelings
Inspiration
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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.
Isadora Duncan / Dancer
Eye
Simple
Tired
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The dancer's body is simply the luminous manifestation of the soul. The true dance is an expression of serenity; it is controlled by the profound rhythm of inner emotion. Emotion does not reach the moment of frenzy out of a spurt of action; it broods first, it sleeps like the life in the seed, and it unfolds with a gentle slowness. The Greeks understood the continuing beauty of a movement that mounted, that spread, that ended with a promise of rebirth.
Isadora Duncan / Dancer
Dance
Expression
Profound
Sleep
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The movement of the waves, of winds, of the earth is ever in the same lasting harmony. We do not stand on the beach and inquire of the ocean what was its movement of the past and what will be its movement of the future. We realize that the movement peculiar to its nature is eternal to its nature. The dancer of the future will be one whose body and soul have grown so harmoniously together that the natural language of that soul will have become the movement of the body.
Isadora Duncan / Dancer
Ocean
Beach
Past
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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.
Isadora Duncan / Dancer
Men
Believe
Children
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Isadora Duncan Quotes - Page 2

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