Quotations

"When you compare the sorrows of real life to the pleasures of the imaginary one, you will never want to live again, only to dream forever."

— Alexandre Dumas, French playwright, born 1802

"It is the way of weakened minds to see everything through a black cloud. The soul forms its own horizons; your soul is darkened, and consequently the sky of the future appears stormy and unpromising."

— Alexandre Dumas, French playwright, born 1802

"There are two ways of seeing: with the body and with the soul. The body's sight can sometimes forget, but the soul remembers forever."

— Alexandre Dumas, French playwright, born 1802

"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, American dancer, born 1877

"There are joys so complete, so all perfect, that one should not survive them."

— Isadora Duncan, American dancer, born 1877

"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, American dancer, born 1877

"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, American dancer, born 1877

"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, American dancer, born 1877

"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, American dancer, born 1877

"The Dance - it is the rhythm of all that dies in order to live again; it is the eternal rising of the sun."

— Isadora Duncan, American dancer, born 1877

"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, American dancer, born 1877

"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, American dancer, born 1877

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

— Isadora Duncan, American dancer, born 1877

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

— Isadora Duncan, Duncan, American dancer, born 1877